Tiqqun - Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

Tiqqun

Preliminary Materials For a

Theory of the Young-Girl

semiotext(e)
intervention
series □ 1 2

Preliminary Materials For a

Theory of the Young-Girl

SEMIOTEXT (E) INTERVENTION SERIES
© Tiqqun

This translation © 2012 by Semiotext(e)

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ISBN: 978-1-58435-108-5

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Printed in the United States of America

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Tiqqun

Preliminary Materials For a

Theory of the Young-Girl

Translated by Ariana Reines

semiotext(e)
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Contents

Preliminaries 11

1. The Young-Girl as Phenomenon 23

2. The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self 48

3. The Young-Girl as Social Relation 62

4. The Young-Girl as Commodity 74

5. The Young-Girl as Living Currency 88

6. The Young-Girl as Compact Political Apparatus 97

7. The Young-Girl as War Machine 105

8. The Young-Girl Against Communism 114

9. The Young-Girl Against Herself 121

10. Putting an End to the Young-Girl

131

I did love you once.

Hamlet

PRELIMINARIES

I

Behind the hypnotic grimace of official pacifica-
tion there is a war being waged. A war that can
no longer merely be called economic, social, or
humanitarian. It has become total. Although
everyone senses that their existence has become a
battlefield upon which neuroses, phobias, soma-
tizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a
retreat, nobody has yet really grasped what is
happening or what is at stake. Paradoxically, it is
the total nature of this war — total in its means
no less than its ends — that has allowed it to
remain invisible.

Rather than open offensives, Empire prefers
more intricate methods, chronic preventative
measures, the molecular diffusion of constraint
into everyday life. Here, internal police conveniendy

11

takes over for general policing, individual self-
control for social control. Ultimately, it’s the
omnipresence of the new police that has made the
war undetectable.

II

What is at stake in the current war are forms-of-
life, which is to say, for Empire, their selection,
management, and attenuation. The stranglehold of
Spectacle over the public expression of desires, the
biopolitical monopoly on all medical power-
knowledge, the restraints placed on all deviance by
an army ever better-equipped with psychiatrists,
coaches, and other benevolent “facilitators,” the
aesthetico-police booking of each individual
according to her/his biological determinations, the
ever more imperative and detailed surveillance of
behavior, the proscription by common accord
against “violence,” all this enters into the anthro-
pological project, or rather the anthropo technical
project of Empire. It is a matter of profiling citizens.

Evidently, impeding the expression of forms-of-
life — forms-of-life not as something that would
mold a material from the outside, material that
would otherwise remain formless, “bare life,” but
rather as that which affects every body-in-situation
with a certain tendency, an intimate motion — does
not result from a pure politics of repression. A

1 2 / Theory of the feung-Giii

whole imperial project of diversion, interference,
and polarization of bodies centered on absences
and impossibilities is at work. The impact is less
immediate but also more durable. Over time, and
via so many combined effects, THEY ultimately
obtain the desired disarmament — in particular
zwzwzzzwo-disarmament — of bodies.

The vanquished in this war are not so much
citizens as those who, denying its reality, have
capitulated from the outset: what THEY allow the
vanquished, in the guise of “existence,” is now
nothing but a lifelong struggle to render oneself
compatible with Empire. But for the others, for us,
every gesture, every desire, every affect encounters,
at some distance, the need to annihilate Empire
and its citizens. A question of letting passions
breathe in their fullness. Following this criminal
path, we have the time; nothing obliges us to seek
out direct confrontation. That would be proof of
weakness. Assaults will be launched, however,
assaults which will be less important than the posi-
tion from which they originate, for our assaults
undermine Empire’s forces just as our position
undermines its strategy. Accordingly, the more
Empire will seem to be accumulating victories, the
deeper it will bury itself in defeat, and the more
irremediable the defeat will be. Imperial strategy
consists first of organizing the blindness of forms-
of-life and their illiteracy when it comes to ethical

Preliminaries / 1 3

differences, of rendering the battlefield difficult
to distinguish if not invisible, and in the most
critical cases, of masking the real war in all manner
of false conflicts.

Retaking the offensive for our side is a matter of
making the battlefield manifest. The figure of the
Young-Girl is a vision machine conceived to this
effect. Some will use it to account for the massive
character of hostile occupation forces in our
existences, others, more vigorous, will use it to
determine the speed and direction of their
advance. What each of us does with this vision
machine will show what we’re worth.

Ill

Listen: The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered
concept. A hiphop nightclub player is no less a
Young-Girl than a beurette' tarted up like a porn-
star. The resplendent corporate advertising retiree
who divides his time between the Cote d’Azur and
his Paris office, where he still likes to keep an eye on
things, is no less a Young-Girl than the urban
single woman too obsessed with her consulting
career to notice she’s lost fifteen years of her life to
it. And how could we account, if the Young-Girl
were a gendered concept, for the secret relationship

* Slang for a French woman of North African descent.

1 4 / Theory of the Young-Girl

between ultratrendy musclebound Marais homos
and the Americanized petit-bourgeoisie happily
settled in the suburbs with their plastic families?

In reality, the Young-Girl is simply the model
citizen as redefined by consumer society since World
War I, in explicit response to the revolutionary
menace. As such, the Young-Girl is a polar figure,
orienting, rather than dominating, outcomes.

At the beginning of the 1920s, capitalism realized
that it could no longer maintain itself as the
exploitation of human labor if it did not also colo-
nize everything that is beyond the strict sphere of
production. Faced with the challenge from socialism,
capital too would have to socialize. It had to create
its own culture, its own leisure, medicine, urbanism,
sentimental education and its own mores, as well as
a disposition toward their perpetual renewal. This
was the Fordist compromise, the Welfare-State,
family planning: social-democratic capitalism. For
a somewhat limited submission to labor, since
workers still distinguished themselves from their
work, we have today substituted integration
through subjective and existential conformity, that
is, fundamentally, through consumption.

The formal domination of Capital has become
more and more real. Consumer society now seeks
out its best supporters from among the marginalized
elements of traditional society — women and youth
first, followed by homosexuals and immigrants.

Preliminaries / 1 5

To those who were minorities yesterday, and who
had therefore been the most foreign, the most spon-
taneously hostile to consumer society, not having yet
been bent to the dominant norms of integration, the
latter ends up looking like emancipation. “Young
people and their mothers,” recognized Stuart Ewen,
“had been the social principles of the consumer
ethic.” Young people, because adolescence is the
“period of time with none but a consumpuve
relation to civil society” (Stuart Ewen, Captains of
Consciousness ). Women, because it is the sphere of
reproduction, over which they still reign, that must
be colonized. Hypostasized Youth and Femininity,
abstracted and recoded into Youthitude and
Femininitude, find themselves raised to the rank of
ideal regulators of the integration of the Imperial
citizenry. The figure of the Young-Girl combines
these two determinations into one immediate,
spontaneous, and perfecdy desirable whole.

The tomboy comes to impose herself as a
modernity more stunning than all the stars and
starlets that so rapidly invaded the globalized
imaginary. Albertine, encountered on the seawall
of a resort town, arrives to infuse her casual and
pansexual vitality into the crumbling universe of
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The school-
girl lays down the law in Witold Gombrowicz’s
Ferdydurke. A new figure of authority is born and
she outclasses them all.

16 / Theory of the Young-Girl

IV

At the present hour, humanity, reformatted by the
Spectacle and biopolitically neutralized, still
thinks it’s fooling someone by calling itself “citi-
zen.” Women’s magazines breathe new life into a
nearly-hundred-year-old wrong by finally offering
their equivalent to males. All the old figures of
patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses
and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last
one of them, even the Pope.

Among its many signs, we recognize that the new
physiognomy of Capital, only an inkling in the
interwar years, has now attained perfection. “Once
its fictive character is generalized, the ‘anthropomor-
phosis’ of Capital becomes a fait-accompli. Then the
mysterious spell is revealed, thanks to which the
generalized credit that rules every exchange (from
banknotes to mortgage payments, from labor or
marriage contracts to ‘human and familial relations,
from education and the diplomas and careers that
follow, to the promises of all ideologies: all exchanges
are now exchanges of dilatory appearance) strikes
with the image of its uniform emptiness the ‘heart of
darkness’ of every ‘personality’ and every ‘character.’
This is how Capital’s people increase, just when
every ancestral distinction seems to be disappearing
and every specificity of class or ethnicity. It’s a fact
that doesn’t cease to amaze that the naive, who still

Preliminaries / 1 7

think’ with their gaze lost in the past” (Giorgio
Cesarano, Chronicle of a Masked Ball). The
Young-Girl appears as the culminating point of
this anthropomorphosis of Capital. The process of
valorization, in the imperial phase, is no longer
simply capitalist: IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL.
Integration into this process, which is no longer
distinct from integration into imperial “society”
and which no longer rests on any “objective” base,
requires that every person permanently self-valorize.

Society’s final moment of socialization, Empire,
is thus also the moment when each person is called
upon to relate to themselves as value, that is,
according to the central mediation of a series of
controlled abstractions. The Young-Girl would
thus be the being that no longer has any intimacy
with herself except as value, and whose every activity,
in every detail, is directed to self- valorization. At
each moment, she affirms herself as the sovereign
subject of her own reification. The unquestionable
character of her power, all of the crushing assurance
of this flattened being, woven exclusively by the
conventions, codes, and representations fleetingly
in effect, all the authority that the least of her
gestures incarnates, all of this is immediately
indexed to her absolute transparency to “society.”

Precisely because of her nothingness, each of
her judgments carries the imperative weight of the
entire social order, and she knows it.

18 / Theory of the Young-Gin

V

The theory of the Young-Girl does not simply
emerge fortuitously when the genesis of the imperial
order is complete and begins to be apprehended
as such. That which emerges is nearing its end.
And in its turn the Young-Girl party will have to
break up.

As the Young-Girlist formatting becomes more
widespread, competition hardens and the satisfac-
tion linked to conformity wanes. A qualitative
jump becomes necessary; it becomes urgent to
equip oneself with new and unheard-of attributes:
One must move into some still-virgin space.
Hollywood sorrow, the political consciousness of
TV news, vague neo-Buddhist spirituality, or an
engagement in some consciousness-soothing
collective enterprise should do the trick. Thus is
born, bit by bit, the organic Young-Girl. The
struggle for the survival of Young-Girls is from
then on identified with the necessity to overcome
the industrial Young-Girl, with the necessity to
move on to the organic Young-Girl. Contrary to
her predecessor, the organic Young-Girl no longer
displays the urge for some kind of emancipation,
but rather a high-security obsession with conservation.
For Empire has been undermined at its founda-
tions and must defend itself against entropy. Having
attained the fullness of its hegemony, it can now

Preliminaries / 1 9

only collapse. The organic Young-Girl would
thus become responsible, ecological, “in solidarity,”
maternal, reasonable, “natural,” respectful, more
self-controlled than falsely liberated, in a word,
fiendishly biopolitical. She would no longer mimic
excess, but rather, moderation in all things.

As we see, when the evidence of the Young-
Girl attains the force of cliche, the Young-Girl is
already out of date, at least in her primitive aspect
of obscenely sophisticated mass production. It is
at this critical moment of transition that we enter
the fray.

VI

So as not to give a false impression — which could
well be our intention — the jumble of fragments
that follows does not in any way constitute a theory.
These are materials accumulated by chance
encounter, by frequenting and observing Young-
Girls: pearls extracted from magazines, expressions
gleaned out of order under sometimes dubious
circumstances. They are assembled here under
approximate rubrics, just as they were published in
TIQQUN 1 ; there was no doubt they needed a little
organization. The choice to expose these elements
in all their incompleteness, in their contingent
original state, in their ordinary excess, knowing
that if polished, hollowed out, and given a good

20 / Theory of the Young-Girl

trim they might together constitute an altogether
presentable doctrine, we have chosen — just this
once — trash theory. The cardinal ruse of theoreti-
cians resides, generally, in the presentation of the
result of their deliberations such that the process of
deliberation is no longer apparent. We figure that,
faced with Bloomesque fragmentation of attention,
this ruse no longer works. We have chosen a different
one. In these scattered fragments, spirits attracted
to moral comfort or vice in need of condemning
will find only roads leading nowhere. It is less a
question of converting Young-Girls than of
mapping out the dark corners of the fractalized
frontline of Young-Girlization. And it is a question
of furnishing arms for a struggle, step-by-step,
blow-by-blow, wherever you may find yourself.

Preliminaries / 21

1

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS PHENOMENON

The Young-Girl is old insofar as she is known to be
young. There is therefore no question for her of bene-
fiting from this reprieve, which is to say of committing
the few reasonable excesses, of experiencing the few
“adventures” expected of people her age, and all this
with an eye to the moment when she will have to
settle down into the ultimate void of adulthood.
Thus, during the time it takes for youth to decay,
social law contains its own violations, which are in
the end just exemptions.

The Young-Girl is obsessed with
authenticity because it’s a lie.

The masculine Young-Girl is paradoxical in that she's
the product of a sort of "alienation by contagion."
Although the feminine Young-Girl appears as the
incarnation of a certain alienated masculine imaginary.

23

there is nothing imaginary about the alienation of
this incarnation. It is altogether concretely that she
has eluded those whose fantasies she populates in
order to face and dominate them. As the Young-Girl
emancipates herself, blossoms, and multiplies, the
dream turns into an all-consuming nightmare. It's at
this point that her former slave returns to tyrannize
yesterday's master. In the end, we witness an ironic
epilogue in which the "male sex" becomes both the
victim and the object of its own alienated desire.

The Young-Gi rl is the figure of the total and
sovereign consumer; she carries herself as
such i n every domai n of exi stence.

The Young- Girl knows so very well the value of things.

Often, before her decay has become too obvious,
the Young-Girl gets married.

The Young-Girl is only good for consuming,
pleasure or work, it doesn’t matter.

The intimacy of the Young-Girl,
now equivalent to all intimacy,
has become something anonymous
and exterior, an object.

The Young-Girl never creates anything;
All in all, she only recreates herself.

24 / Theor,' of the Young-Girl

By investing young people and women with an
absurd symbolic surplus value, by making them the
exclusive carriers of the two new kinds of esoteric
knowledge proper to the new social order — con-
sumption and seduction — -Spectacle has effectively
emancipated the slaves of the past, but it has eman-
cipated them as slaves.

The most extreme banality of the Young-Girl
is to take her/himself for an original.

The stunted quality of the Young-Girl's language,
although it implies an incontestable narrowing of the
field of experience, in no way constitutes a practical
handicap, because it was not made to talk with, but
rather to please and to repeat.

Chatter, curiosity, equivocation, hearsay, the
Young-Girl incarnates the fullness of improper
existence, whose categories Heidegger identified.

The Young -Girl Li a lie
whode apogee id the face.

When Spectacle’s proclaims that woman is the
future of man, it is naturally speaking of the
Young-Girl, and the future it predicts recalls only
the worst cybernetic slavery.

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 25

“No kidding!”

The Young-Girl manages to live with a dozen
unarticulated concepts, as her only philosophy, that
immediately become moral categories, meaning
that the whole of her vocabulary can be definitively
reduced to the Good/Evil binary. It goes without
saying that, in order to consider the world, it must
be sufficiently simplified, and in order to permit
her to live in it happily, the world must make many
martyrs, starting with herself.

“Highly visible physical imperfections, even if
they have no effect on aptitude for work, weaken
people socially, transforming them into the
involuntary invalids of work.”

(Dr. Julius Moses, Afa-Bundeszeitung, Februrary 1929)

In the Young-Girl, what is sweetest is also the
cruelest, what is most “natural” is most feigned,
what is most “human” is most machine-like.

Adolescence is a recent category
created according to the demands
of mass consumption.

The Young-Girl invariably calls “happiness”
everything to which THEY chain her.

26 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl is never simply sad, she is also
sad that she’s sad.

Ultimately, the Young-Girl’s ideal is
domestic.

Bloom is the crisis of classic sexuation and the
Young-Girl is the offensive by which market
domination has responded to this crisis.

There is no more chastity in the Young-Girl
than there is debauchery. The Young-Girl simply
lives as a stranger to her desires, whose coherence
is governed by her market-driven superego. The
ennui of abstraction flows into this come.

There is nothing, neither poetry nor ethnology,
neither Marxism nor metaphysics, that the
Young-Girl cannot fit into the closed horizon of
her vapid quotidian.

“Albertine comes from nowhere , and is very modem in that
way: she flutters, comes and goes, from her absence of
attachments she derives the instability and the unpredictable
quality which give her her power of freedom’’ (Jacques
Dubois, For Albertine: Proust and the Sense of the Social).

When it addresses itself distinctly to the Young-
Girl, the Spectacle is not above a bit of bathmology.
This is why the entire significance of boy-bands and

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 27

girl-bands comes from making a show of the very
fact of making a show. The lie consists, here — by
means of crude irony — in presenting as a lie what is
on the contrary the truth of the Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl is struck by sudden vertigo
whenever the world stops revolving
around her.

The Young-Girl sees herself as the holder of a sacred
power: the power of commodities.

“I love children. They’re beautiful,
honest, and they smell good.”

The mother and the whore, as Weininger understands
them, are equally present in the Young-Girl. But the
one hardly renders her any more worthy of praise
than the other makes her worthy of blame. In fact,
over time, a curious reversibility between the two
can be observed.

The Young-Girl is fascinating in the manner of
all things that exhibit a closing-in-on-themselves, a
mechanical self-sufficiency or an indifference to the
observer, like the insect, the infant, the automaton, or
Foucault’s pendulum.

Why must the Young-Girl always feign
some activity or other?
To remain Unassailable in her

passivity.

28 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The “freedom” of the Young-Girl rarely goes beyond the
ostentatious cult of the most pathetic of the Spectacle’s
productions. Essentially, it consists in opposing a lack of
zeal with the necessities of alienation.

THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG-GIRL THE NAME OF A GROUP OF
“COMMUNIST” GIRLS. ORGANIZED IN THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS
OF PARIS IN 1936 FOR THE “ ENTERTAINMENT, EDUCATION. AND THE
DEFENSE OF THEIR INTERESTS."

The Young-Girl wants to be desired without
love or loved without desire. There is no threat,

in either case, to her unhappiness.

The Young-Girl

has love STORIES.

It is enough to recall what she classifies as “adventure”
to get a good idea of just how much the Young-Girl
fears the possible.

The old age of the Young-Girl is no less hideous
than her youth. From one end to the other, her
life is nothing but a progressive shipwreck in
formlessness, and never an irmption of becoming.
The Young-Girl wallows in the limbo of time.

As for the face of the Young-Girl, differences in age,
like difference in gender, are insignificant. There is no

Tiie Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 29

age to be struck by youthitude, nor is there a gender that
forbids itself a dash of femininitude.

Just like the magazines THEY intend for her
and which she devours so painfully, the life
of the Young-Girl is divided and organized
into so many columns, between which the
greatest separation reigns.

THE YOUNG'GIRL IS THAT WHICH, BEING
ONLY THIS, SCRUPULOUSLY OBEYS THE
AUTHORITARIAN DISTRIBUTION OF ROLES.

Love for the Young- Girl
is just autism for two.

What they continue to call virility is nothing more
than the infantilism of men and femininity the
infantilism of women. Moreover, perhaps one
ought to speak of virilism and of “feminism” when
so much voluntarism is mixed into the acquisition
of an identity.

The same disabused stubbornness that characterized
the traditional woman, assigned to the home with
the duty of ensuring survival, blossoms, at present,
in the Young-Girl, now emancipated from the
domestic sphere and from all sexual monopoly. She
will from now on express herself everywhere: in
her irreproachable affective impermeability at

30 / Theory of Tie Young-Girl

work, in the extreme rationalization she imposes
on her “emotional life,” in her every step, so
spontaneously military, in the way she fucks,
carries herself, or taps away on her computer—
which is no different from the way she washes her car.

“One piece of information that I obtain in a well-
known Berlin department store is particularly
instructive: ‘When taking on sales and office staff,’
says an influential gentleman from the personnel
department, ‘we attach most importance to a pleasant
appearance.’ From a distance he looks a bit like
Reinhold Schunzel in early films. I ask him what he
understands by ‘pleasant’ — saucy or pretty. ‘Not exactly
pretty. What’s far more crucial is . . . oh, you know, a
morally pink complexion.’

I do know. A morally pink complexion — this com-
bination of concepts at a stroke renders transparent the
everyday life that is fleshed out by window displays,
salary-earners, and illustrated papers. Its morality must
have a pink hue, its pink a moral grounding. That is
what the people responsible for selection want. They
would like to cover life with a varnish concealing its
far-from-rosy reality. But beware, if morality should
penetrate beneath the skin, and the pink be not quite
moral enough to prevent the eruption of desires! The
gloom of unadorned morality would bring as much
danger to the prevailing order as a pink that began to
flare up immorally. So that both may be neutralized,

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 31

they are tied to one another. The same system that
requires the aptitude test also produces this nice,
friendly mixture; and the more rationalization pro-
gresses, the more the morally pink appearance gains
ground. It is scarcely too hazardous to assert that in
Berlin a salaried type is developing, standardized in
the direction of the desired complexion. Speech,
clothes, gestures, and countenances become assimilated
and the result of the process is that very same pleasant
appearance, which with the help of photographs can
be widely reproduced. A selective breeding that is
carried out under the pressure of social relations, and
that is necessarily supported by the economy through
the arousal of corresponding consumer needs.

Employees must join in, whether they want to or
not. The rush to the numerous beauty salons springs
partly from existential concerns, and the use of cosmetic
products is not always a luxury. For fear of being
withdrawn from use as obsolete, ladies and gentlemen
dye their hair, while forty-year-olds take up sports to
keep slim. ‘How Can I Become Beautiful?’ runs the title
of a booklet recently launched on to the market; the
newspaper advertisements for it say that it shows ways
‘to look young and beautiful both now and forever.’
Fashion and economy work hand in hand. Most people,
of course, are in no position to consult a specialist. They
fall prey to quacks or have to make do with remedies as
cheap as they are dubious. For some time now the
above-mentioned deputy Dr. Moses has been fighting

32 / Theory of !he Young ■Girl

in their interest in parliament, for incorporating proper
provision for disfigurement into social security. The
young Working Community of Cosmetic Practitioners
of Germany has associated itself with this legitimate
demand” (Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty
and Distraction in Weimar Germany , 1930).

The loss of metaphysical direction is not distinct,
in the Young-Girl, from the “loss of the sensory"
(Arnold Gehlen) in which the extreme modernity
of her alienation is verified.

The Young-Girl moves in the oblivion of Being,
no less than in that of the event.

The incompressible agitation of the Young-Girl, in
the image of this society at its every point, is
governed by the hidden demand to render effective
a false and pathetic metaphysics, whose most
immediate substance is the negation of the passage
of time, and the obscuring of human finitude.

The Young-Girl

RESEMBLES HER PHOTO.

Insofar as her appearance entirely exhausts
her essence, as her representation does her
reality, the Young-Girl is that which is
entirely expressible, perfectly predictable,
and absolutely neutralized.

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon /33

The Young-Girl exists only in proportion to the
desire that THEY have for her, and knows herself
only by what THEY say she is.

The Young-Girl appears as the product and the
principal outcome of the formidable surplus crisis
of capitalist modernity. She is the proof and the
support of the limitless pursuit of the process of
valorization when the process of accumulation
proves limited (by the limits of the planet itself,
ecological catastrophe, or social implosion).

The Young-Girl is content to cover over
with a falsely provocative hidden sense the
actual economic sense of her motivations.

All the freedom of movement the Young-Girl
enjoys in no way prevents her from being a prisoner,
from manifesting, in every circumstance, the
automatisms of the shut-in.

The way to be the Young-Girl is to be nothing.

Managing to “succeed in her sentimental
and professional life at the same time”:
certain Young-Girls proclaim this as an
ambition worthy of respect.

The “love” of the Young-Girl is just a
word in the dictionary.

34 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl requires not only

that you protect her,

she also wants the power to educate you.

The eternal return of the same styles in
fashion is enough to convince: The Young-
Girl does not play with appearances. It is
appearances that play with her.

Even more than the feminine Young-Girl, the mas-
culine Young-Girl, with his fake muscles, absurdity,
which is to say, suffering, in what Foucault called
“the discipline of bodies”: “Discipline increases the
forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and
diminishes these same forces (in political terms of
obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the
body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude, ’
a ‘capacity, ’ which it seeks to increase; on the other
hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power
that might result from it, and turns it into a relation
of strict subjection” ( Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish).

“Oh, a girl, that receptacle of shame under
beauty’s lock and key!”

(Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, 1937)

There is surely no place where one feels

as horribly alone

as in the arms of a Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 35

When the Young-Girl gives in to her own
insignificance, she still manages to find
glory in it, because she is "having fun."

“This was precisely what captivated me — the
maturity and autonomy of her youth, the self-
assurance of her style. While we, in school, had
our blackheads, constantly broke out in pimples
and ideals, while our movements were gawky and
each step was a gaffe, her exterior was entrancingly
polished. Youth, for her, was not a transitional
age — for this modern one, youth was the only time
befitting a human being. [...] Her youth had no
need of ideals, it was in and of itself an ideal”
(Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke) .

The Young-Girl never learns anything.

That’s not why she’s here.

The Young-Girl knows all too well what she
wants in detail to want anything in general.

“DON’T TOUCH MY BAG!”

The triumph of the Young-Girl originates
in the failure of feminism.

The Young-Girl does not speak. On the contrary,
she is spoken by the Spectacle.

The Young-Girl wears the mask of her face.

36 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl reduces all grandeur
to the level of her ass.

The Young-Girl is a purifier of negativity, an
industrial profiler of unilaterality. In all things, she
separates the negative from the positive, and
generally retains only one of the two. No surprise
that she doesn’t believe in words, which in fact
have no meaning in her mouth. Let it Suffice,

for us to be convinced,
to see what she means
by “romantic”
which after all
has little to do
with Holderlin.

“We must hence envisage the birth of the ‘young girl’
as the construction of an object in which different
disciplines compete (from medicine to psychology,
from physical education to morality, from physiology
to hygiene)” (Jean-Claude Caron, The Body of
Young Girls).

The Young-Girl would like for the simple
word love not to imply the project
of destroying this society.

"AH, THE HEART!"

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 37

"Don't confuse your job with your feelings!"

In the life of the Young-Girl, inactivated
opposites thrust into nothingness complement
each other, and never contradict.

The Young-Girl’s sentimentalism and materialism,
however opposed they may appear, are really in solidarity:
two aspects of her central void.

The Young-Girl is happy to speak of her childhood
with emotion, in order to give the impression
that she has not gotten over it, that at bottom,
she is still naive. Like all whores, she dreams of
candor. But unlike whores, she insists that we
believe her, and that we believe her sincerely.
Her infantilism, which is ultimately just a childlike
fundamentalism, makes her the wiliest vector of
general infantilization.

The pettiest sentiments still retain, for the
Young-Girl, the prestige of their sincerity.

The Young-Girl loves her illusions
the same way she loves her reification:
by proclaiming them.

The Young-Girl knows everything as devoid
of consequences, even her own suffering.
Everything is funny, nothing’s a big deal.
Everything is cool, nothing is serious.

38/ Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl wants to be recognized not for
what she might be, but for the simple fact of her
being. She wants to be recognized in the absolute.

U£e young ~S?irf is not £ere to 6e criticized.

When the Young-Girl arrives at the age limit of
infantilism, where it becomes impossible not to ask
oneself the question of ends for fear of finding
oneself suddenly in search of means (which, in this
society, can arrive very late), she reproduces.
Paternity and maternity constitute one method
among others, no less devoid of substance than all
the rest, of holding out

UNDER THE EMPIRE OF NECESSITY.

The Young-Girl doesn’t kiss you,

SHE DROOLS OVER YOU THROUGH HER TEETH.

Materialism of secretions.

The Young-Girl adopts above all the point of
view of psychology, about herself as much as the
course of the world. This is how she manages to
present a certain consciousness of her own reifica-
tion, a consciousness that is itself reified, as it’s
cut off from all gesture.

The Young-Girl knows
the standard perversions.

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 39

"TOO CUTE!"

The Young-Girl’s aim is balance. Not the balance of
a ballerina, but of an accountant.

The smile has never served as an argument.
There is also the smile of skulls.

The Young-Girl’s affectivity is made only of signs,
and occasionally, mere signals.

Wherever ethos is lacking or decomposing, the
Young-Girl appears as the bearer of the fleeting
and discolored mores of the Spectacle.

The Young-Girl

is not expected to understand you.

The Young-Girl’s predilection for actors and actresses
can be explained according to the laws of elementary
magnetism: whereas they are the positive absence of
any quality, the void that takes all forms, she is but the
negative absence of quality. Thus, like his reflection,
the actor is the same as the Young-Girl, whose

negation he also is. THE YOUNG"GlRL CONCEIVES LOVE
AS ONE SPECIFIC KIND OF ACTIVITY.

The Young-Girl's laughter rings with the desolation

of nightclubs.

The Young-Girl is the only insect that consents
to the entomology of womens magazines.

Theory of the Young-Giri

40/

Identical, in this, to misery,
a Young- Girl never shows up alone.

Thus wherever Young-Girls dominate, their taste
must also dominate; this is what determines the
tastes of our time. The Young-Girl is the purest form
of reified relations; she is their truth. The Young-
Girl is the anthropological concentrate of reification.

The Spectacle amply remunerates, though
indirectly, the conformity of the Young-Girl.

In love more than anywhere else, the Young-Girl
behaves like an accountant, always suspecting
that she loves more than she is loved, and that
she gives more than she receives.

Among Young-Girls there is a community of gesture
and expression that is anything but moving.

The Young-Girl is ontologically virgin,

virgin of all experience.
The Young-Girl can display solicitude,
provided one is truly miserable. This is one
aspect of her resentment.

The Young-Girl does not perceive the passage of
time any more than she is moved by its “conse-
quences.” Otherwise, how else could she speak of
aging with such indignation, as though it were a crime
committed against her?

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 41

Even when she isn’t trying to seduce, the
Young-Girl acts like a seductress.

There is something professional about everything the Young-Girl does.

The Young-Girl will never stop flattering
herself for having "Common Sense . "

In the Young-Girl, even the most insipid
moralisms have the air of prostitution.

The Young-Girl possesses all the severity of the economy.
However, the Young-Girl is more ignorant of abandon
than anything else.

The Young-Girl is the entire reality of the Spectacle's
abstract codes.

The Young-Girl occupies the central node of the present
system of desire.

The Young-Girl’s every experience is drawn back
incessantly into the preexisting representation she
has made for herself. All the overwhelming con-
creteness, the living part of the passage of time and
of things are known to her only as imperfections, as
alterations of an abstract model.

The Young-Girl is
resentment that smiles .

There are beings that give you the desire to die slowly
before their eyes, but the Young-Girl only excites the
desire to vanquish her, to take advantage of her.

42 / Theory of the Ybung-Girt

The Young-Girl does not couple

IN TRANSPORT TOWARD THE OTHER,
BUT IN ORDER TO ESCAPE HER UNBEARABLE NULLITY.

The supposed liberation of women did not consist
in their emancipation from the domestic sphere,
but rather in the total extension of the domestic
into all of society.

In the face of any person who would seek to
make her think, the Young-Girl will always
pride herself on being a realist.

Insofar as what she hides is not her secret, but rather
her shame , the Young-Girl hates the unexpected,
especially when it is not programmed.

"Being in love:

a drug that reduces stress.”

The Young-Girl never stops repeating it: She wants
to be loved for who she is, which is to say for the
non-being she is.

The Young-Girl is the living and continual
introjection of all repression.

The “self” of the Young-Girl
is as thick as a magazine.

Nothing, in the conduct of the Young-Girl, has a
reason in itself. Everything is ordered by the
dominant definition of happiness. The Young-Girl’s
estrangement from herself borders on mythomania.

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 43

As a last resort, the Young-Girl fetishizes “love” so
as to avoid an awareness of the entirely conditioned
nature of her desires.

“I’m so happy 1 could give a shit
about being free!”

“The chemistry of passion: Today, everything is
explainable, even the fact of falling in love! Farewell
romanticism, since the ‘phenomenon’ is just a series
of chemical reactions.”

In their divorce,

the Young-Girl's heart and ass

have become two empty abstractions.

"The ghostly image of the cinema hero modelfs] the embraces
of adolescents , and later adultery" (Max Horkheimer/
Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment).

The Young-Girl is steeped in deja-vu. For her, the
first-time experience is always a second time in
representation.

Naturally, nowhere has there been a “sexual libera-
tion”— that oxymoron! — but only the pulverization
of everything that slowed the total mobilization of
desire in view of th t production of merchandise. The
“tyranny of pleasure” does not incriminate pleasure,
but tyranny.

44 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl knows how to
take feelings into account.

In the world of Young-Girls, coitus appears
as the logical sanction of all experience.

The Young-Girl is “satisfied with life,”
at least that’s what she says.

The Young-Girl only establishes relationships
based on the strictest reification and on false
substantiality, where THEY can be sure that what
unites in fact only separates.

The Young-Girl is optimistic, thrilled, positive,
happy, enthusiastic, joyful;
in other words, she suffers .

The Young-Girl is produced wherever nihilism
begins to speak of happiness.

There is nothing special about the
Young-Girl; that is her "beauty."

The Young-Girl is an optical illusion.

From afar, she is an angel, and up close, she is a beast.

The Young-Girl doesn’t age.

She decomposes.

We know, in general,

what the Young-Girl thinks of worrying.

The Young-Girl’s education is the inverse of all
other forms of education: First the immediate

The Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 45

innate perfection of youth, then the effort to
maintain herself at the height of this primary nullity,
and finally, collapse in the face of the impossibility
of returning to this side of time.

Viewed from afar, the Young-Girl’s nothingness appears
relatively habitable, at certain moments even comfortable.

"Love, Work, Health."

The Young-Girl’s “beauty” is never a particular
beauty, or one that might belong to her. On the
contrary, hers is a beauty without content, an
absolute beauty free of any personality. The
Young-Girl’s “beauty” is but the form of a void,
the spectral form of the Young-Girl.

And this is why she can, without choking on her
words, speak of “beauty,” because her own is never
the expression of a substantial singularity, but a pure
and ghostly objectivity.

“Indeed, only now does [the basic ideological
confusion between woman and sexuality]
assume its full scope since women, once
subjugated as a sex, are today '‘liberated’’ as
a sex [...] Women, young people and the
body — the emergence of all of which after
thousands of years of servitude and forgetting

46 / Theory of the Young-Girl

in effect constitutes the most revolutionary
potentiality — and, therefore, the most funda-
mental risk for any social order whatever —
are integrated and recuperated as a ‘myth
of emancipation.’ Women are given Woman
to consume, the young are given the Young
and, in this formal and narcissistic emanci-
pation, their real liberation is successfully
averted” (Jean-Trissotin Baudrillard, The
Consumer Society: Myths and Structures).

The Young-Girl offers an unequivocal
model of the metropolitan ethos:
a refrigerated consciousness living
in exile in a plasticized body.

“Too cool!!!” Instead of saying
“very” the Young-Girl says “too,”
while in fact, she is so very little.

Tne Young-Girl as Phenomenon / 47

2

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS TECHNIQUE OF THE SELF

“What is Pleasure?”

There is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in
the deepest zones of her intimacy, that escapes
alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codification
and the gaze of the Spectacle. This intimacy strewn
with commodities yields entirely to advertising, and
is entirely socialized as intimacy, which is to say that
she is part-for-part subject to a fallacious common-
ality that does not allow her to express herself.

For the Young-Girl, what is most secret is also most public.

The Young-Girl's body is an encumbrance,
it is her world and it is her prison.

The Young- Girl’s physiology is the offensive
glaze of her false substantiality.

The Young-Girl desires the Young-Girl.

48

The Young-Girl is the Young-Girl’s ideal.

"Tired of macho guys? Why not
try an objectified man..."

The rhetoric of the war of the sexes, and thus for
now, of women’s revenge, operates as the ultimate
ruse through which the logic of virility will have
vanquished women without their knowledge: by
enclosing them, at the price of a simple role reversal,
in the submission/domination alternative, to the
exclusion of all else.

"what does the mortification of the body
require? That we nourish a sacred and implaca-
ble hate for our bodies" (Spiritual instructions
for the Sisters of Saint Vincent-de-Paul, 1884).

The Young-Girl tries to express the self-referential
closing-in-on-herself and the systematic ignorance of
lack. This is why she is without defect, in the same
way she is without perfection.

In fairly recent prehistory, when there were only
women’s magazines for women, a rumor lasting the
length of a season suggested that these magazines had
a depressing effect on their readers. Here and there one
heard, based on an “American scientific study,” the
most meager gossip of the age, that whenever a woman
closed one of them she was noticeably sadder than
before she’d opened it — she produced less serotonin,

The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self / 49

no doubt. And it is true, for whoever has tried to catch
a Young- Girl in the midst of such an exercise will have
noted her air of concern, of anguished seriousness and
haste in turning the pages, as though picking through
the rosary of an unloved religion. It seems that the act
of contrition, in Empire’s religion of biopolitics, has
managed to survive quite well, indeed, having only
become more immanent.

"I'm gonna do whatever
I want with my hair!"

The Young-Girl methodically reinvests everything
from which she has been liberated with pure servi-
tude. (It would be good, for example, to ask oneself
what contemporary woman , which is a fairly terrible
species of Young-Girl, has done with the “liberty”
that the struggles of feminism have won her.)

The Young-Girl is an attribute of her own program,
in which everything must be regimented.

“At twelve years old, i decided to be beautiful”

The tautological nature of the Young-Girl’s beauty
is rooted in the fact that she sees no alterity, but only
the ideal representation of herself. This explains
why her supposed interlocutor is thrown into
such a terrible space, even if he is free to believe,
idiotically, that she is meant for him. The Young-Girl

50 / Theory of the Young -Girl

establishes a space of power insofar as this space is
not, in the end, a means to approach her.

The Young-Girl has sexuality in the
exact proportion to which all sensuality
is foreign to her.

“In consequence, the biologization of sex in
particular and of the body in general establishes
the body of the young girl as the ideal laboratory
for the medical gaze” (Jean-Claude Caron, The
Body oj Young Girls).

The “youth" and “femininity" of the Young-Girl,
in fact her youthitude and femininitude,
are that through which the control of appearances
extends to the discipline of bodies.

The Young-Girl considers her ass a sufficient founda-
tion for her sentiment of incommunicable singularity.

The Young-Girl is so psychological... She
has succeeded in rendering herself 2.sflat as
the object of psychology.

It is in the very being of the Young-Girl to reduce the
metaphysical fact of finitude to a simple question of
technique, which is the most effective anti-wrinkle
cream? The most moving characteristic of the Young-

The Young-Girl as Technique of te Self / 51

Girl is doubtless this maniacal effort of attaining, in
her appearance, a definitive impermeability to time
and space, to history and her environment, to be
everywhere and always impeccable.

Protestant ethics, rejected as a general principal of
how society functions and as a behavioral norm since
the end of the “morality of producers,” has at the
same time, and more rapidly since World War II,
been wholly taken up at the level of the individual:
since then it has massively governed the relation
people have with their own bodies, their passions,
and their lives, all of which they economize.

Certainly because eroticism presents itself to the
Young-Girl in all the unquestionable positivity
that is inevitably attached to sexuality, and
because transgression itself has become a tranquil
norm, isolatable and encoded, coitus is not
among those things that, in the relations one
entertains with the Young-Girl, allows you to
advance beyond a certain exteriority; rather, it
locks you in this exteriority.

uNew breasts for my 18th birthday/7

The “youth” that the Spectacle has granted
the Young-Girl is a very bitter gift, for this
“youth” is what is incessantly LOST.

52 / Theory of the Young-Girt

What is living need not express itself too
much. What is dying dissipates in rattle
the obvious approach of its end. The
Young-Girl’s excessive affirmation of her
sexuation attests to the agony of classical
sexuation, that is, to its material basis. The
spectre of Man and Woman haunts the
streets of the metropolis. Its muscles come
from the gym, her breasts are silicone.

Between the Young-Girl and the world there is a
window. Nothing touches the Young-Girl, the
Young-Girl touches nothing.

Nothing in the identity of the Young-Girl truly
belongs to her, even less her “youth” than her
“femininity.” She does not possess attributes,
instead, her attributes possess her, those they have
so generously loaned her.

The Young-Girl chases after health

as though it were salvation.

The sense of the self as meat, as the heap of an
organ variously filled with ovaries or flanked by balls,
is the basis from which emerge the aspiration and
finally the failure of the Young-Girl to give herself
form, or at the very least to simulate one. This feeling

The Young- Girl as Technique of the Seif f 53

is not merely a lived consequence of the aberrations
of Western metaphysics — which wants the formless
to precede form, brought to it from outside — it is also
what market domination must perpetuate at all cost,
and which it constantly produces by rendering all
bodies equivalent, by degenerating forms-of-life,
by continually imposing an undifferentiating
confusion. The loss of contact with the self, the
crushing of all intimacy with the self, which makes
the sense of self meat — these form the condition sine
qua non for readopting the techniques of the self that
the Empire offers for consumption.

The depth of penetration of this consumer junk can be
read in the intensity of the feeling of the self as meut.

The exhausting

ersniD of Domes

The feeling of contradiction between one's exis-
tence as a social being and one's existence as a
singular being, which tears Bloom apart, does not
enter the Young-Girl, who doesn't have a singular
existence anymore than she has feelings in general.

"ME £* MY BREASTS, MY BELLY BUTTON,
MY BUTT, MY LEGS: A JOURNAL OF
MY BODY"

The Young-Girl is her own jailer, prisoner in a body-
made-sign inside of a language made of bodies.

54 / ! heory of the Young-Girl

"Oh this cult, this obedience, the girl's slavery just
because she is a schoolgirl and because she's
modern I [...] Oh, this was slaveryto the pointof
self-effacement for the sake of style, what obedience
on the girl's part!" (Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke).

"The profoundly-rooted instinct in women,
which pushes them to use perfumes, is the
manifestation of a law of biology. The first duty
of a woman is to be attractive... Your degree of
intelligence or independence is of little impor-
tance, if you do not manage to influence the
men you encounter, whether consciously or
not, you are not fulfilling your fundamental duty
as a woman..." (Advertisement for a perfume
from the 1920s in the United States).

The Young-Girl conceives her own existence

as a management problem
that it is her job to resolve.

Before designating a relation to the other, a
social relation or a form of symbolic integration,
the Young-Girl designates a relation to the self,
which is to say, to time.

Contrary to all appearances, the Young-Girl is not
worried about herself. She is not, strictly speaking,
egotistical, nor for that matter egocentric, which is
why her “self” is also another. That to which she

The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self / 55

consecrates all of the care of intransigent piety is
for her, in fact, an exterior reality: her “body.”

The application of capital-form to all
things— health capital, sun capital, sympa-
thy capital, etc. — and more particularly to
bodies, means that the alienated social
totality now mediates relations once ruled
by immediacy.

In the Young-Girl, the tension between convention
and nature apparently disappears as the meaning of
the terms is lost, so much so that one never seems
to do violence to the other.

The Young-Girl is like capitalism, domestic
servants, and protozoa: She knows how to adapt
and what’s more, she’s proud of it.

Contrary to what is true of traditional
societies, which recognized the exis-
tence of abject things and exposed
them as such, the Young-Girl denies
their existence and dissimulates them.

The appearance of the Young-Girl is the
Young-Girl herself. Between the two
there is nothing.

Like all slaves, the Young- Girl thinks that she is the
object of much more surveillance than she really is.

56 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl’s absence to herself is not contradicted
by any of the “care” she seems to show for herself.

The Young-Girl is never plastic
enough for her taste.

The Young-Girl doesn’t like wrinkles,
wrinkles do not conform;
wrinkles are the writing of life;
life does not conform.

The Young-Girl is as terrified of wrinkles as she is
of all true EXPRESSION.

In the guise of self-consciousness, the Young-
Girl only has a vague sense of life.

For the Young-Girl, bare life
still functions as clothing.

The Young-Girl lives sequestered inside her own "beauty"

The Young- Girl doesn't love,
she loves herself loving.

Zm v, Sp'&bd/, OrjtMsLc: 3 UfbstyLe, tU&bs”

The Young-Girl does not go as far as requiring that
the short-lived conventions to which she submits
have any meaning.

The Young-Girl understands all relations on the
model of the contract , more precisely, a contract that
can be revoked at any point according to the interests

The Young-Giri as Technique of the Seif / 57

of the signatories. It is a form of bargaining about
the differential value of each actor in the seduction
market, in which it is necessary, in the end, for
someone to pocket the dividends.

"Are you OK with your body?

Is your young carcass, dressed in graceful

curves, well-maintained? Is your frame solid?

The linings silky? Are you in good shape?”

The Young- Girl produces herself daily
as such, via the maniacal reproduction of the
dominant ethos.

"How to lose ten years with
the right lifestyle."

A cosmetics multinational recently launched a
major advertising campaign for an anti-wrinkle
cream by the name of Ethic. In so doing, it simul-
taneously revealed that there is nothing as ethical
as covering oneself in shit every morning in order
to conform to the categorical imperative of
youthitude, and that there could not possibly be
any ethos other than that of the Young-Girl.

“Beauty” is the mode of unveiling proper to the

Young-Girl in the Spectacle. This is why she is

58 / Theory of the Voung-Qp

also a generic product, containing all of the
abstraction of that which is forced to address
itself to a certain segment of the sexual market-
place, inside of which everything looks alike.

Capitalism has truly created wealth, because it
discovered it where it had formerly been invisible.
This is how, for example, capitalism created beauty,
health, or youth as wealth , that is, as qualities that
possess you.

The Young-Girl is never satisfied with her submis-
sion to consumer metaphysics, with the docility of
her entire being, and obviously of her entire body,
to the norms of the Spectacle. This is why she
displays the need to exhibit it.

"They have offended the
thing I hold most dear: my
image" (Silvio Berlusconi).

The Young-Girl always-already lives as a couple,
that is, she lives with her image.

The Young-Girl confirms the psychological
import of consumer semiocracy.

HOW MUCH BEAUTY HAVE YOU COT? NO, BEAUTY IS
NOT A QUESTION OF SUBJECTIVE APPRECIATION.
UNLIKE CHARM, MUCH TOO FLUID A NOTION,
BEAUTY IS CALCULATED IN CENTIMETERS, DIVIDED

The Young-Girl as Technique of the Self / 59

INTO FRACTIONS, WEIGHED, EXAMINED BY MAGNI-
FYING GLASS, EVALUATED IN ITS THOUSANDS OF SLY
DETAILS. STOP HIDING BEHIND NEO-HIPPY PRINCI-
PLES, LIKE 'INNER BEAUTY, THAT'S WHAT COUNTS,'
'I'VE GOT MY OWN STYLE,' AND DARE TO MEASURE
YOURSELVES IN TH E COURT OF TH E GREATS!!!"

The Young-Girl’s beauty is produced. She doesn’t
mind saying so: “Beauty doesn’t fall from the sky,”
that is, it’s the fruit of labor.

The Young-Girl’s self-control and self -constraint
are obtained through the introjection of two
unquestionable “necessities”: that of reputation
and that of health.

To cLny, no t suffering U not n Lwxnry.
It’s n right”

Officially, the Young- Girl has preferred
to become a thing that feels,
rather than a Bloom who suffers.
The Young-Girl pursues plastic perfection in all its
forms, in particular, her own.

From working out to anti-wrinkle creams
and liposuction, the Young-Girl’s determination
is the same regardless — to disregard her body, and
to make her body an abstraction.

60 / Theory of the Young-Girt

"Anything you cun do to
come to terms with your image. "

However vast her narcissism, the Young-Girl
doesn’t love herself; what she loves is “her” image,
that is, something that is not only foreign and
exterior to her, but that possesses her, in the full
sense of the word. The Young-Girl lives under the
tyranny of this ungrateful master.

AS A LAST RESORT, THE YOUNG-GIRL DRAPES
HERSELF IN HER OWN LACK OF MYSTERY.

THE YOUNG-GIRL IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A POINT OF VIEW ON THE PASSAGE OF HME,

BUT A POINT OF VIEW THAT IS ALIVE.

The Young-Girt as Technique of the .Seif / 61

3

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS SOCIAL RELATION

The Young-Girl is the elementary social relation,
the central form of the desire of desire in the Spectacle.

And meanwhile, love has been lost in the
most foulest of spectacular role-plays.

The Young-Girl never gives herself; she only gives
what she has, which is to say the array of qualities that
THEY loan her. This is also why it is not possible to
love the Young-Girl, but only to consume her.

"I CAN'T GET ATTACHED, OK?”

Seduction is an aspect of social labor: that of the Young-Girl.
The Young-Girl’s impotence or frigidity concretely
manifest that her own erotic power is detached from
her and autonomized to the point of dominating her.

62

When the Young-Girl giggles,
she’s working.

The Young-Girl’s reification fits so well
into the world of the authoritarian
commodity that it should be considered
her fundamental professional skill.

Sexuality is every bit as central for the Young-Girl as
each one of her couplings is insignificant.

And they are realistic,
even in love.

The Young-Girl does not content herself with the
belief that sexuality exists. She swears she has
encountered it. For new gods, new superstitions.

u ~h) flails a joocf screw?”

Never forget that the Young-Girl who loves you also chose you.

"Lovesickness

can make you lose seven pounds."

For the Young-Girl, seduction never ends, which is
to say that the Young-Girl ends with seduction.

Every relation with the Young-Girl consists in being
chosen anew at every instant. In this it imposes the
same contractual precarity as work does.

The Young-Girl as Social Relation / 63

The Young-Girl doesn’t love anyone, which is to
say that she only loves the impersonality of them.
She manages to detect the Spectacle wherever it is
to be found, and wherever she finds it, she adores it.

Because in the Spectacle, even “carnal union”
opportunely increases separation.

"BELIEVE IN BEAUTY."

The "dictatorship of beauty" is also the
dictatorship of ugliness. It does not signify
the brutal hegemony of a certain paradigm
of beauty, but rather, more radically, the
hegemony of the physical simulacrum as the
form of the objectivity of beings. Understood
as such, we can see that nothing prevents such
a dictatorship from extending over everyone —
the beautiful, the ugly, and the indifferent.

The Young-Girl does not mind miming submission
here and there: because she knows it dominates. Something
in this brings her in line with the masochism that has
long been taught to women, which makes them cede
the signs of power to men in order to recover, inter-
nally, the certitude that they possess them in reality.

Sexuality does not exist .

It is an abstraction, a moment of human relations that
has been detached, hypostasized, and rendered ghostly.

64 / Theory of ti :e Young -Girl

The Young-Girl only feels at home in relationships
of pure exteriority.

The Young-Girl is both production and a factor
of production, that is, she is the consumer, the
producer, the consumer of producers, and the
producer of consumers.

The Young-Girl’s “femininity” designates
only the fact that the Spectacle has
turned the legendary intimacy of “Woman”
with nature into absolute intimacy with
the “second nature” of Spectacle.

The couple: to petrify all of the uncontrollable
fluidity of distance between bodies by carving out a
territory that can be appropriated for intimacy.

The Young-Girl gives the word “desire” a very par-
ticular meaning. Make no mistake: In her mouth, it
does not designate the inclination that a mortal being
might feel for another mortal being or for any-
thing, but rather, on the impersonal plane of value: a
difference of potential. It is not this being’s tension
towards its object, but rather a tension in the dull
electrical sense of a motor imbalance.

The Young-Girl as Social Relation / 65

Seduction is not originally the spontaneous relation
between men and women, but rather the dominant
relation of men amongst themselves. Thus seduction
always had sexuality as an empty center, but a center
which was repulsive even before its effect was
reversed. Shame and exhibitionism are the opposing
poles of an identical fiction.

Through the eyes of the Young-Girl,
the Spectacle is looking at you.

The Young-Girl’s existential posture has quickly
irradiated every field of human activity. In architec-
ture, it is called fagadism, for example.

The Young-Girl possesses her reality outside of herself,
in the Spectacle, in all of the doctored representations
of the ideal that it traffics, in the fleeting conventions it
decrees, in the mores through which it commands
mimesis. She is simply the insubstantial concretion of
all these abstractions, which precede and follow her.
In other words, she is a purely ideological creature.

"Cerebral control freak, frigid obsessive, dynamic
performer, unstable creative type, energetic control-
freak, friendly emotional type, repressed sensitive
type, emotional volunteer. Who are you really?"

THE ESSENCE OFTHE YOUNG-GIRL IS
TAXONOMICAL.

66/ Theory of the Yourg-Girl

Among the relations monads can have amon gst
themselves, seduction is the one that most con-
forms to their essence. Seduction's fundamental
hypothesis is the completeness and impermeability
of the two parties. An impermeability to what she
nevertheless embraces— that is whatthe Young-Girl
calls "respect."

Flirtation is the most obvious realm
of the mechanical functioning
of relationships in consumer society.

“From all this we see that fashion furnishes an ideal
field for individuals with dependent natures, whose
self-consciousness, however, requires a certain
amount of prominence, attention, and singularity.
Fashion raises even the unimportant individual by
making him the representative of a class, the
embodiment of a joint spirit. [. . .] It is peculiarly
characteristic of fashion that it renders possible a
social obedience, which at the same time is a form of
individual differentiation. [. . .] it is the mingling of the
sensation of rulership with submission, the influence
of which is here at work" (Georg Simmel, Fashion).

The blackmailing of the couple is increasingly
becoming the blackmailing of sexuality. But this
process has doubled in turn: The Young-Girl really
only allows “best friends” to get close, in whom all

The Young-Girl as Social Relation / 67

sexual latency has been extinguished in advance, and
none will be held at a greater distance than those
she has let into her bed. It is the experience of this
distance that substitutes the partner for the lover.

The behavior of the Young-Girl
betrays her obsession for calculation.

"If she were mine, she would never belong
only to me, nor should she. Beauty is there
for everyone to see: It is a public institution"
(Carlo Dossi, Amori, 1887).

In her own way, the Young-Girl is aiming
for “zero flaws.” This is why she extends
first to herself the regime ruling the pro-
duction of things. Her imperialism is not
extraneous to the intention of serving as
the example for all other Blooms.

All the Young-Girl’s activity, to which she has
abdicated all liberty and into which she continually
loses herself, is COSUietiC in nature. In this way
she resembles the whole of society, which devotes
such care to the maintenance of its facade.

The Young-Girl has taken to calling the reified
set of her own limitations her “personality.”
She can thus assert her right to nullity as a
right to “be herself,” that is, to be only that, a
right that must be conquered and defended.

68 / Theory of the Young-Girl

For sexuality to have spread into every sphere of
human existence, it was first necessary for THEM to
fantasmatically dissociate it as a moment separated
from the totality of the rest of life.

The body of the Young-Girl is merely a concession
THEY have made to her, more or less durably, which
explains the hatred she has for it. Her body is just a
rented residence, something from which she can
only derive usufruct, meaning only her use of it is
free, and moreover, because its very walls — her
corporeality projected as capital, a factor of pro-
duction and consumption — are possessed by the
autonomized social totality.

"Who does he think he is!?"

The Voung-Girl is a form of "social relation" in the
primary sense of what relates you to this society.

"The Perfect Sexual Relationship cannot
be improvised:

you decide on it

prepare for it
plan it!"

The Young-Girl's love affairs are work
and like all work
they have become precarious.

The Young-Girl as Social Relation / 69

As identities without substance, “virility” and
“femininity” are but useful tools in the Spectacle’s
management of social relations. They are fetishes
necessary to the circulation and consumption of
other fetishes.

The Spectacle loves itself, desires itself, admires itself,
in the Young-Girl, its Pygmalion.

Caught inside herself, the Young-Girl doesn't express
anything. She is a sign whose meaning is elsewhere.
The Young-Girl is an instrument of degradation:
Everything that comes into contact with her is degraded
into a Young-Girl.

"Living together and every man for himself."

The Young-Girl is the extreme point
of alienated socialization, at which
the most socialized person is also the
most asocial .

In sexuality, as with money, it is the relations that
become autonomized from what they put into relation.

It is precisely by imparting to her body, but more generally
to her whole being, the character of capital that THEY
have dispossessed the Young-Girl of both body and being.

Sexuality is a separation device. In it, THEY have
made socially acceptable the fiction of a sphere of
truth of all relations and beings, in which the
distance between self and self, as with the distance

70 / Theory of the Young-Girl

between self and other, can finally be abolished,
where pure coincidence can be found. The fiction
of sexuality presents the truth/appearance, sincerity/
falsehood alternative in such a way that all that is
not sexuality is rejected as falsehood. It preemptively
undermines any possibility of developing relations
between beings. The art of distances, through
which one can experiment with leaving separation,
is constructed against the device of “sexuality” and
its binary extortion.

The Young-Girl is also a design element, a precarious
floating wall of the “modern” conditions of existence.

Even in love, the Young-Girl speaks the language of
political economy and management.

The whole world of the Spectacle is a mirror

that shows the Young-Girl

the assimilable image of her ideal.

In the world of the Young-Girl, the demand for liberty
comes clothed in the demand for seduction.

The Young-Girl is the anecdote of the world,
and the domination of the world of the anecdote.

"Job. You are entering a highly constructive period
that is energetically driving you forward. Everything is
coming together: luck, creativity, popularity.

Love. Your charm is bringing you lots of positive
feedback."

The Young -Girl as Social Relation / 71

For the Young-Girl, the language of horoscopes is also
“the language of real life.”

The Young-Girl displays the specifically magical
ability to convert the most heterogeneous “qualities”
(fortune, beauty, intelligence, generosity, humor,
social origins, etc.) into a single “social value” governing
her every relational choice.

The Spectacle seeks to awaken the Young-Girl
sleeping in everyone. This is the uniformity
whose phantasm it pursues.

The deception of porn is that it claims to
represent the obscene, making visible the
point at which all representation evaporates. In
reality, any family meal, any managerial meeting
is more obscene than a facial ejaculation.

There isn’t room for two in the body
of the Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl’s desire to convert herself into a
sign simply expresses her desire to belong tA all costs
to the society of non-belonging. It signifies a constant
effort to remain in harmony with her visible being.
The challenge explains the fanaticism.

Under modern conditions of production, to
love is impossible. In the way in which a

72 / Theory of the Young-Girl

commodity is unveiled, gift-giving appears
either as an absurd weakness, or as taking
place within a flux of other exchanges and
thus governed by “calculated disinterest.”
Since man is supposed to know only his
own interests, and only to the extent that
these don’t ever fully emerge, only false-
hood and simulation are plausible. Thus,
when it comes to the intentions and real
motivations of the other, paranoid suspicion
reigns: The gift is so suspect that it
becomes necessary to pay to give. The
Young-Girl knows this better than anyone.

The dirty game of seduction

When private property is emptied of all of its
metaphysical substance, it does not immediately
die. It survives, but its content is then only
negative: the right to deprive others of the use
of our assets. As soon as coitus is freed from
any immanent meaning, it proliferates. But in
the end, it is only the ephemeral monopoly on
the use of the genital organs of the other.

With the Young-Girl, the superficiality of being

is caused by the superficiality of all relations.

The Young-Girl as Social Relation / 73

4

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS COMMODITY

The Young-Girl isn’t as worried about possessing
the equivalent of what she’s worth on the market-
place of desire as she is about assuring herself of her
value, which she wants to know with certitude and
precision, according to the thousand signs remaining
for her to convert into what she’ll call her “seduction
potential,” in other words, her mana.

"She who has not found a way to give herself will
find a way to sell herself" (Stendhal).

“How to be sexy without
coming across as a bitch.”

The value of the Young-Girl is not based on some inte-
rior, or simply intrinsic, ground, but solely on her
exchangeability. The value of the Young-Girl only
becomes apparent in her relation to another Young-

74

Girl. This is why she is never alone. In making the
other Young-Girl her equal in value, she puts herself
into relation with herself as value. In putting herself
into relation with herself as value, she differentiates
herself from herself as a singular being. “Representing
itself as something differentiated from itself, it begins
to show itself, in reality, as a commodity” (Marx).

The Young-Girl is the commodity that insists on
being consumed, at every instant, because at
every instant she becomes more obsolete.

The Young-Girl doesn’t contain within herself that for
which she is desired: her Publicity.

The Young-Girl is an absolute: She is bought because
she has value, she has value because she is bought.

The tautology of commodities.

The Young-Girl is the one who has preferred
to become a commodity, rather than passiveLy
suffer its tyranny.

In love as in the rest of this “society,”
nobody is expected to ignore his or
her own value.

The Young-Girl is the place where products
and the human coexist in an apparently non-
contradictory manner.

The Young-Giri as Commodity / 75

The world of the Young-Girl evinces a singular
sophistication, in which reification has made added
progress: In it, human relations mask market rela-
tions which mask human relations.

“You deserve better than that guy/chick.”

The Young-Girl inhabits the Spectacle just like a woman
in the primitive world, as an object of Advertising. But
the Young-Girl is also the subject of Advertising,
exchanging itself. This schism in the Young-Girl is her
fundamental alienation. To which is added the following
drama: Whereas exogamy effectively maintained perma-
nent ties between tribes, the Young-Girl’s mana slips
through her fingers, her Advertising fails, and it is she
herself who suffers the consequences.

The Young-Girl is lost in her price.

That's all she is now, and she's sick to her stomach.

Shame for the Young-Girl doesn’t come from
being bought, but rather from not being bought.
She derives glory from her value, and even
more glory from putting a price on herself.

Nothing is less personal than the
"personal value" of the Young-Girl.

It isn’t rare that, through an abuse of language that
slowly becomes an abuse of reality, the owners of a

76 / 'l heory of the Young-Girl

unique or precious object develop an affection for a
thing, and finally claim to “love” it, even “to love it a
lot.” Likewise, some “love” a Young-Girl. Of course,
if it was truly the case they would all die of sorrow.
The Young-Girl sets in motion the self-commodification
of what is beyond the market; the auto-estimation of
the inestimable.

hJlJk... rooOq {vnjGX Od\j X%\<l .

The “personal value” of the Young-Girl is simply
the “price” at which she is willing to be
exchanged, and it is the reason why she enters
exchange so rarely — in order to increase her value.

The Young-Girl sells her existence
like it’s a private service.

The Young-Girl continues to count out
the incalculable she gives.

In the exchange initiated by the Young-Girl, the personal is
traded against the personal on the terrain of the impersonal
marketplace.

The Young-Girl, by nature bothered by love, only
allows herself to be approached conditionally, con-
clusively, or with a sale in mind. Even when she
seems to abandon herself completely, she only
abandons the part of herself that is under contract,
preserving or reserving the liberty she hasn’t alienated.

The Young-Girl as Commodity / 77

Because the contract can never subjugate the entirety
of the person selling herself, some portion of her
must always remain outside the contract, precisely to
contract with others. The abject character of love in
its current incarnation cannot be explained more
clearly or with greater verisimilitude. “From this one
could conclude that the absoluteness of the relation-
ship has been perverted from the onset and that, in a
mercantile society, there is indeed commerce
between beings but never a veritable ‘community,’
never a knowledge that is more than an exchange
of ‘good’ procedures, be they as extreme as is con-
ceivable. Power relationships in which it is the one
who pays or supports who is dominated, frustrated
by his very power which measures only his
‘impotence’” (Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable
Community ).

“Hold on tight!”

The Young-Girl remains at all times the staunch
owner of her body.

She is a waitress, model, publicist, or
promoter. Today, the Young-Girl sells her
“power of seduction” the way her “labor
power” used to be sold.

Every success in seduction is essentially a
failure, for, just as we do not buy a commodity,

78 / Theory of the Young- Girl

but rather a commodity that wants to be
bought, it is not a Young-Girl we seduce, but
rather a Young-Girl who wants to be seduced.

The broker of a fairly singular brand of transaction,
the Young-Girl trains all her efforts toward achieving
a good fuck.

The diversity of social, geographic, or morpho-
logical constraints weighing on each grouping of
human organs that the Young-Girl encounters
are not sufficient to explain her differential
positioning among competing products. Their
exchange value is neither based on any singular
expression nor on any substantial determination
that could truly be made equivalent, not even
through the powerful mediation of the Spectacle.
This value is therefore not determined by some
imaginary natural factors, but rather by the sum
of labor furnished by each individual in order to
render himself recognizable in the vitreous eyes
of the Spectacle, that is, in order to produce
himself as the sign of the qualities recognized by
alienated Advertising, and which are never,
finally, but synonyms for submission.

The Young-Girl's primary skill:

arranging for her own scarcity.

Relaxing, for the Young-Girl, consists in knowing
exactly what she's worth.

The Young-Girl as Commodity / 79

"What an insult!
Rejected by an old guy!"

The Young-Girl is never worried about herself, but only about
her value. Thus, when she encounters hatred, she is struck by
doubt: Has her market value dropped?

If it were worth it to them to speak, Young-Girls would
say: "Our use-value may interest men, but it does not
belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as
objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as
commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely
as exchange-values" (Karl Marx, Capital).

“ Seduce usefully.

Don’t waste your time attracting just anybody. "

The Young-Girl relates to herself in the same way
that she relates to all of the products with which she
surrounds herself.

"Don't devalue yourself like that!"
For the Young-Girl, it is first and foremost a matter of making
herself worth something.

Just as an object acquired by a certain sum of money
becomes pathetic compared to the infinite virtualities
that this sum contained, the sexual object that the
Young-Girl possesses is but a deceptive crystallization
of her “seduction potential.” Actual sex is but the
poor objectification of all the coitus that she could
just as well engage in. The Young-Girl’s derision
of all things is the mark of a religious intuition
that has fallen into the wrong infinitude.

80 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl is the most authoritarian com-
modity in the world of authoritarian commodities,
the one that nobody can fully possess and that
nevertheless polices you and can be withdrawn
from you at any moment.

The Young-Girl is the commodity that claims to
single out its acquirer sovereignly.

The Young-Girl lives

at home

among commodities,

which are her sisters.

The absolute triumph of the Young-Girl reveals that
sociality shall henceforth be the most precious, most
prized commodity of all.

What characterizes the imperial period, that of the Spectacle and
Biopower, is that the Young-Girl's own body takes on the form
of a commodity that belongs to her. "On the other hand, it is
only at this moment that the commodity form of human beings
becomes generalized" (Karl Marx).

The vitrified aspect of the face of the Young-Girl
must be explained by her status as commodity: She
is the crystallization of a certain quantity of labor
spent to put her in accordance with the norms of a
certain type of exchange. And the form of the
Young-Girl’s appearance, which is also that of a
commodity, is characterized by the obscuring, if not
the voluntary forgetting, of this concrete labor.

The Young-Giri as Commodity / 81

In the Young-Girl’s “love life” a relationship between
things takes the phantasmagorical form of a relationship
between singular beings.

With the Young-Girl, it is not only that commodities take hold
of human subjectivity. It is human subjectivity that first reveals
itself as the interiorization of commodities.

One has to think that Marx didn’t have the Young-
Girl in mind when he wrote that “commodities
cannot go to market and make exchanges of their
own account.”

“Originality” is part of the Young-Girl’s system
of banality. It is this concept that allows her to
make all singularities equivalent as pure, empty
singularities. In her eyes, all nonconformity takes
place in a kind of nonconformist conformity.

“My a poet. "

It is always surprising to see how the theory of
comparative advantage, developed by Ricardo,
is more fully verified in the commerce of Young-
Girls than in that of inert goods.

It is only in exchange that the Young-Girl attains
her value.

From the provinces, from the suburbs, or
from rich neighborhoods, insofar as they're
Young-Girls, all Young-Girls are equivalent.

82 / Theory of the Young-Girl

A commodity is the materialization of a relation,
the Young-Girl is its incarnation.

In our time, the Young-Girl is the commodity most in demand:
the human commodity.

Within the mode of unveiling of the commodity, in
which "beauty" unveils nothing of its own, appearance having
become autonomous of all essence, the Young-Girl, no matter
what she does, cannot escape giving herself to just anyone.

“Whatever,

if not her then somebody else. .

The "laws of the market" have been individualized
in the Young-Girl.

What THEY still call “love” is nothing but fetishism attached
to a particular commodity: the human commodity.

The eye of the Young-Girl carries within it the
effective entering-into-equivalence of all places, all
things, and all beings. Thus the Young-Girl can
consciously reduce everything that enters her field
of perception to something she already knows from
alienated Advertising. This is what her language is
continually translating, full as it is of “like”...
“kinda”.. . and other “stuff”.. .

The Young-Girl is a central aspect of what
Negrists call "the putting-to-work of desire and

The Young-® as Commodity / 83

affect," forever dazzled as they are by this world
of commodities in which they still find nothing
worthy of reproach.

"Seduction: I earn love marketing!

You dream about him, he doesn't notice.
Snag him with the lows of marketing. No
man can resist a well-conceived marketing
campaign. Especially if the product is you."

WHERE THE SPECTACLE REIGNS, TH E VALUE
OF THE YOUNG-GIRL IS IMMEDIATELY
EFFECTIVE: HER BEAUTY ITSELF IS FELT
AS EXECUTIVE POWER.

In order to conserve her "scarcity value," the Young-Girl
must sell herself only at the highest price, which signifies that
she must usually give up selling herself. Thus, as we often
see, the Young-Girl is an opportunist even in abstinence.

"...Because I'm worth it!"

In classical economic terms, we have to admit that
the Young-Girl is a “Giffen good” or “Giffenian,”
that is, an object, as opposed to what “usually” takes
place, whose demand rises the more expensive it is.
This category includes luxury goods, of which the
Young-Girl is certainly the most vulgar.

84 / Theory o' the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl never allows herself to
be possessed as a Young-Girl in the same way
that a commodity never allows itself to be
possessed as a commodity, but only as a thing.

“YOU CAN BE PRETTY, SURROUNDED
BY FRIENDS, PESTERED WITH PICK-UP
LINES, AND YET ALONE INSIDE.”

The Young-Girl only exists as a Young-Girl within
the system of general equivalency and its mas-
sive circulatory movement. She is never possessed
for the same reason that she is desired. The very
moment one acquires her, she is taken out of
circulation, the mirage fades, she sheds her
magic aura and her nimbus of transcendence.
She's stupid and she reeks.

“The modern world Id not univerdally prodti-
tutional for the dale of luxury. It would he
incapable of that. It id univerdaiiy prodtitutional
becaude it id univerdaiiy interchangeable”
(Charles Peguy, Note conjointe).

The Young-Girl is the universal beneficiary of all
the pseudo-concreteness of this world, and of
the pseudo-objectivity of coitus f irst of all.

The Young- Girl would like to be a thing, but
does not want to be treated like a thing. Yet all

The Young-Gir! as Commodity / 85

her distress comes not only from the fact that
she’s treated like a thing, but that on top of that
she can’t manage to really be a thing.

"No, my body is not ci piece of merchandise.
It’s a tool for work."

The appalling thing isn't that the Young-Girl is
fundamentally a whore, but that she refuses to
perceive herself as such. Because the whore,
being not only she who is bought, but also she
who sells herself, is a maximalist figure of liberty
among commodities.

The Young-Girl is a thing to the very extent that she
takes herself to be human: She is a human being to
the very extent that she takes herself to be a thing.
The whore represents the most eminent saintliness
that the world of commodities can conceive of.

“Be yourself! (It pays.)”

One ruse of market thinking would have it appear that
what she contains that is not on the order of com-
modities— what is “authentic” or "good" about her —
determines the Young-Girl's value.

The Young-Girl is a crisis of coherence that
shakes the very bowels of consumer society.
She responds to the imperative of the total
commodification of existence, to the necessity

86 / theory o' the Young-Girl

of making sure nothing will remain outside
the commodity form in what we still call,
euphemistically, “human relations.”

The mission she has been given is to re-enchant
a devastated world of commodities, of prolong-
ing the disaster with joy and insouciance. She
inaugurates a form of second-degree con-
sumption: the consumption of consumers. If
we give credence to appearances, which has
become legitimate in many cases, we would
have to say that the commodity has achieved,
through the Young-Girl, the total annexation
of the non-commodity.

THE YOUNG-GIRL'S ASS REPRESENTS THE
LAST BASTION OF I LLUSION OF A USE VALUE
WHICH HAS SO MANIFESTLY DISAPPEARED
FROM THE SURFACE OF EXISTENCE. THE
IRONY, OF COURSE, IS THAT THIS VALUE IS
STILL, ITSELF, AN EXCHANCE.

Within the Spectacle, we can say of the
Young-Girl what Marx remarked about
money, calling it “a special kind of commodity
that is set apart from other commodities by
a common act, and which serves to expose
their reciprocal value.”

The Young-Girl as Commodity / 87

5

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS LIVING CURRENCY

The Young-Girl becomes demonetized when she goes
out of circulation. When she loses the possibility
of re-entering the marketplace, she begins to rot.

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as&lqned/ to/ the/ ciwuAaMon/ op standout/ averts/.

Value has never measured anything, but what it already
failed to measure, it now measures more and more poorly.

Living money represents the ultimate
answer of consumer society to the impotence of
money to equal, and thus to purchase, the most
notable human productions, those that are at once
the most precious and the most common. For as the
empire of money has spread to the farthest reaches
of the world and to every expression of human life,
it has lost all its specific value, it has become as

88

impersonal as its concept, and consequently so
negligible that its equivalency with anything
personal has been rendered highly problematic. It is
this absolute inequality between the empire of
money and human life that has always shown itself
in the impossible retribution of prostitution. With
living money, market domination has been able to
cancel these two impotencies — the one to purchase
human life as such, which is to say, power , and the
other, to purchase its most eminent productions —
by multiplying them. Living money manages to
render equivalent what is incommensurable in the
personal creations of humanity — which have become
preponderant — and what is incommensurable in
human life. Henceforth, the Spectacle will
estimate the inestimable via the inestimable
in “objective” values.

‘“Living currency’: The industrial slave is
both a sign guaranteeing wealth and the wealth itself.
As a sign it stands for all manner of other material
wealth, and as wealth it excludes all demands that are
not those demands whose satisfaction it represents.
But satisfaction proper is equally excluded by its
being a sign” (Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency).

A quality of exclusion belongs to the Young-

Girl, the Young-Girl as commodity, linked to

the fact that she is also, irreducibly, a human

The Young-Girl as Living Currency / 89

being, which is to say something that is, like
gold, a means to its own end. It is in light of
this exceptional situation that she assumes the
role of general equivalency.

Living currency, and specifically the Voung-Girl,
furnish a fairly plausible solution to the crisis of
value, nouu incapable of measuring and remunerating
those creations most characteristic of this society —
those linked to the general intellect.

The conservation of minimal social con-
ventions is conditioned by the fact that an excess
of living currency would depreciate its value,
rendering it incapable of constituting any real off-
set to the inestimable it is destined to purchase. At
the same time, in rendering the inestimable
estimable, it saps its own resources. The spectre
of inflation haunts the world of Young-Girls.

The Young-Girl is the final cause of spectacular
economy and its prime mover, immobile.

The Young-Girl’s ass doesn’t possess any
new value, but only the unprecedented deprecia-
tion of all values that preceded it. The devastating
power of the Young-Girl will have consisted in
liquidating all products not convertible into
living currency.

In this total nihilism, all notion of
grandeur or prestige would have disappeared
long ago, if they hadn’t been immediately con-
verted into Young-Girls.

90/ Theory of tho Young-Girl

The Young-Girl never misses a chance to extend the
victory of living currency to mere money. Thus she
requires, in exchange for herself, an infinite counter-gift.

Money has ceased to be the ultimate term of economy.
Its triumph has depreciated it. The naked emperor,
whose metaphysical content has deserted him, has
also lost all value. Nobody in the biopolitical herd
respects it anymore. Living currency is what has
come to take the place of money as general equiva-
lent, that in light of which its value is established.
Living currency is its own value and concreteness.
The purchasing power of living currency, and a for-
tiori of the Young-Girl, has no limits: It stretches to
the totality of everything that exists, because in
her, wealth enjoys itself doubly: both as sign and
as fact. The high level of “individualization” of
men and their creations, which had made money
unfit to serve as mediator in purely personal relations,
has now become the condition for the circulation of
living currency.

It appears that all of the
concreteness of the world
has taken refuge in the ass
of the Young -Girl.

Just as establishing social misery became necessary
after ’68 in order to return to commodities the honor
they had lost, likewise sexual misery is necessary for

The Young. Girl as Living Currency / 91

the maintenance of the tyranny of the Young-Girl,
of living currency. But the misery revealed here is
no longer related to a temporal or economic con-
text, on the contrary it is the essential misery of
“sexuality” that has finally appeared.

"In the case of movables, possession gives title."

IN NO WAY DOES MONEY CONTRADICT LIVING
CURRENCY. IT IS AN EARLIER MOMENT WHICH
THE LATTER PRESERVES. WITH ALL OF ITS
ACCOUNTING THAT NOW MEASURES NOTHING.

Once the translation of highly differentiated
human life into money became impossible, THEY
invented the Young-Girl, who restored to devalued
money its value. But at the very same time she
downgraded money, made it a secondary factor,
the Young-Girl regenerated it, returning to it
some substance. And it is thanks to this ruse that
money survives.

The impersonality of the Young-Girl has the
same ideal, impeccable, and purifying substance as
money. The Young-Girl herself has no smell.

Just as “use value” bears no relation to its
exchange value, the emotion that living money
arouses is not susceptible to accounting and is not
commensurate with any thing. But just as use value
does not exist independent of exchange value, so the
emotion aroused by living currency does not exist

92 / Theory of the Young-Giii

outside the system in which the latter is exchanged.
One takes no more pleasure in the Young-Girl than
one does in gold; one enjoys only their uselessness
and scarcity. The indifference and insensitivity of
Bloom were necessary preambles to concretizing the
illusion of such an emotion, and its objectivity.

When Marx posits that exchange value
crystallizes the labor time that was neces-
sary to produce the object, he affirms only
that value is ultimately formed only by way
of the life that has been canceled in the
object, which is to say that living currency
precedes all forms of cash.

"As soon as the corporeal presence of the industrial
slave has fully entered the composition of the
assessable output of what she can produce— her
physiognomy being inseparable from her labor—
the distinction between the person and the activity
of that person becomes specious. The corporeal
presence is already a commodity, independently of
and in addition to the commodity this presence
contributes to producing. Henceforth industrial
slaves either establish an intimate relation between
their corporeal presence and the money this
presence brings in, or else they substitute themselves
for the function of money, being money themselves:
at once the equivalent of wealth and the wealth
itself" (Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency).

Trie Young-Girl as Living Currency / 93

In French, the verb “to fuck” is generically used to
ref er to any activity, though with a derogative conno-
tation. “What the fuck are you doing?” And it is a
reality that, in all societies in which man’s activity is
not free, to fuck occurs as freedom’s general abstract
equivalent, the degree zero of all activity.

It wasn’t until the Young-Girl appeared that one
could concretely experience what it means to
“fuck,” that is, to fuck someone without fucking
anyone in particular. Because to fuck a being that is
so really abstract, so utterly interchangeable, is to
fuck in the absolute.

If money is the king of commodities,
the Young-Girl is their queen.

THEY prefer silent pornstars— mute ,
without discourse— not because what
pornstars have to say would be intol-
erable, or excessively crude, but on
the contrary because, when they talk,
what they say about themselves is
nothing but the truth of all Young-
Girls. "X take vitamins to have nice
hair, " one of them confides. "Taking
care of your body is a daily job. It's
normal, you have to work on your
appearance, on the image people have
of you . "

94 / Theory of the Young-Girl

In the final phase of the Spectacle, everything is sexually
mediated, which is to say that coitus has been substituted as
the ultimate goal of the utility of individual things. It is toward
coitus that the existence of the world of the commodity now
exclusively moves.

"As long as free love doesn't become
widespread, a certain number of young
girls will always be needed to fill the
function that prostitutes fill today"
(Georg Simmel, Philosophie de I'amour).

Young-Girls in the service sector, marketing,
retail, and social services. In a near and pre-
dictable future, all of the surplus value of the
capitalist regime will be produced by Young-Girls.

The currency of coitus is self-esteem.

Every Young-Girl is an automatic, standard con-
verter of existence into market value.

The Young-Girl is in fact neither the
subject nor the object of emotion, but
its pretext. One does not get off on a
Young-Girl, or on her getting off; one
gets off on getting off on her. A
wager becomes necessary.

In many traditional cultures, money is the metaphor
for woman, for fertility. In the time of the Young-
Girl, woman becomes the metaphor of money.

The Young-Girt as Living Currency / 95

Like money, the Young-Girl is the equivalent
of herself, referring only to herself.

The Young-Girl is true gold, absolute cash.

It is a unilateral-fetishistic point of view that asserts
that “the living object that is the source of emotion,
from the point of view of exchange, is worth its main-
tenance cost” (Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency ).

The time freed up by the increasing perfec-
tion and efficiency of the instruments of production
did not result in any decrease in “labor” time, but in
the extension of the sphere of “labor” into the totality
of life, and especially in the constitution and main-
tenance of a sufficient stock of living currency, of
available Blooms and Young-Girls, to give birth to a
parallel and pre-regulated sexual marketplace.

The ghostly nature of the Young-Girl echoes the
ghostly nature of participation in this society, for
which the Young-Girl is also the remuneration.

Living money finally reveals the truth of commodity
exchange, in other words, its lie: the impossibility of
making equivalent the incommensurable in human life
(classically coagulated in "labor time") and the inert,
money, or any other thing, no matter what the quantity.
For, in the end, the lie of market society has been to
pass off what has always been a SACRIFICE as con-
trolled exchange, and thus to claim to be settling an
INFINITE DEBT.

96 / Theory of the Young-Gin

6

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS COMPACT
POLITICAL APPARATUS

More distinctively, but no less fundamentally than a
commodity, the Young-Girl constitutes an offensive
neutralization apparatus.

How could capitalism have managed to mobilize affects, mole-
cularizing its power to the point of colonizing all of our feelings and
emotions, if the Young-Girl had not offered herself as intermediary ?

Like the economy, the Young-Girl thinks shes got us by
the infrastructure.

Me iniydt Aide"

since History’s happening on the dark side.
Biopower is available as a cream, pill, and spray.
Seduction is the new opium of the masses. It
is the freedom of a world without freedom,
the joy of a world without joy.

In the past, the terrifying example of a few liberated
women was enough to convince the dominant powers
of their chance to prohibit all feminine freedom.

97

By sentiment, by physiology, by family, by “sincerity,”
by “health," by wants, by obedience to all social deter-
minisms, by all means, the Young-Girl protects
herself from liberty.

Behind the appearance of a laughable
neutrality, the most formidable of political
oppression apparatuses is on view in the
Young-Girl.

tf our srx life normal?”

The Young-Girl advances like a living engine,
moved by and moving toward the Spectacle.

Domination has discovered a bias more
powerful than the simple power of constraint:
directed attraction.

The Young-Girl is the elementary
biopolitical individuality.

Historically, the Young-Girl appears, in her extreme
affinity with Biopower, as the spontaneous addressee
of all biopolitics, the one whom THEY address.

‘Eating badly is a luxury, a sign or laziness. Disdain

FOR THE BODY IS A COMPLETELY COMPLACENT RELATION TO
SELF. The FEMALE WORKER MUST MAINTAIN HER BODY
CAPITAL [GYM, POOL], WHILE FOR THE STUDENT, MORE
IMPORTANT ARE AESTHETIC ACTIVITIES [DANCE] OR THE
ULTIMATE PHYSICAL EXPENDITURE: THE NIGHTCLUB.”

98 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The function of the Young-Girl is to transform the
promise of liberty contained in the achievement of
Western civilization into a surplus of alienation, a
deepening of the consumer order, new servitudes, a
political status quo.

The Young-Girl advances toward the same
endpoint as Technology: the formal spiritualization
of the world.

Under the domination of the market,
seduction immediately presents itself as
the exercise of a power.

The Young-Girl has neither opinions
nor positions of her own.
She takes shelter as soon as she can

in the shadow of the victors.

The “modern” kind of labor, in which a certain
quantity of the labor force is no longer taken
advantage of, but rather the docile exercise of
certain “human qualities,” suits perfectly well the
mimetic skills of the Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl is the cornerstone of the system
maintaining the market order, and is at the service
of all its restorations. Because the Young-Girl wants
to fuck in peace.

The Young-Girl as Compact Political Apparatus / 99

The Young-Girl is the ideal collaborator.

The Young-Girl conceives liberty as the possibility of
choosing from among a thousand insignificances.

The Young-Girl does
not want history.

The Young-Girl aims for the regulation of all the senses.

In the world of authoritarian commodities, all naive
praise of desire immediately becomes praise of servitude.

There is no slave of semiocracy who does not also get
a certain power out of it, the power of judgment, blame,
or opinion.

The Young-Girl embodies the way in which
capitalism has reinvested all of the necessities
from which it had liberated men, reinvested
them in an unrelenting adaptation of the
human world to the abstract norms of the
Spectacle, and in the elevation of these
norms. Both share the morbid obsession of
remaining, at the price of frantic activity,
identical to themselves.

The narrow control and excessive solicitude
displayed by this society toward women
expresses only its desire to reproduce itself
identically, and to master its perpetuation.

100 / Theory of the Young-Girl

"The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences,
in a publication on the role of women in modern America
(1929), concluded that moss consumption hod mode of
the 'modern housewife...less of o routine worker and more
of on odministrotor ond entrepreneur in the business of
living'" (Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising
and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture).

The initial form of Biopower is a process of submis-
sion to and by the body.

The Spectacle keeps the body at bay through
the excess of its evocation, just as religion
evoked it by excessively prohibiting it.

The Young-Girl prizes “sincerity,” “good-heartedness,”
“kindness,” “simplicity,” “frankness,” “modesty,” and in
general all of the virtues which, considered unilaterally,
are synonymous with servitude. The Young-Girl lives
in the illusion that liberty is found at the end of total
submission to market “Advertising. ” But at the end of
servitude there is nothing but old age and death.

“Lberty doesn’t exist” says the Young-Girl,

WALKING INTO THE DRUGSTORE.

The Young-Girl wants to be “independent,”
that is, in her spirit, dependent
on THEM alone.

The Young-Girl as Compact Political Apparatus / 1 01

Any grandeur that is not also a sign of subjugation
to the uuorld of authoritarian commodities is in that
cose consigned to the absolute detestation of the
Voung-Girl, mho is not afraid to speak of “arro-
gance," “self-importance" and even "contempt."

The Young-Girl is the central article of permissive
consumption and commodity leisure.

In the Spectacle, access to liberty is nothing but
access to marginal consumption in the desire market-
place, which constitutes its symbolic core.

The preponderance of the entertainment and
desire market is one stage in the project of social
pacification, in which this market has been given
the function of obscuring, provisionally, the living
contradictions that traverse every point of the
fabric of imperial biopolitics.

The symbolic privileges accorded by the Spectacle
to the Young-Girl are her dividends for absorbing
and diffusing the ephemeral codes, the updated
user's manuals, the general semiology that they
have had to dispense in order to render politically
harmless the free time enabled by "progress" in the
social organization of labor.

The Young-Girl:

the mainspring of The Young-Girl: the agent coordinating
^permissive discipline. " the atmosphere and liveliness

of the dictatorial management oF leisure.

1 02 / Theory of the Young-GM

Deep down inside, the Young-Girl has the
personality of a tampon: She exemplifies all
of the appropriate indifference, all of the
necessary coldness demanded by the condi-
tions of metropolitan life.

It matters little to the Spectacle that seduction is hated
everywhere, as long as people don’t give themselves the
idea that some plenitude could ever transcend it.

WHEN THE SPECTACLE ATTEMPTS TO "PRAISE
feminitiy,” OR REMARKS FAWNINGLY THE
"FEMINIZATION OF THE WORLD,” ONE CAN
ONLY EXPECT THE CUNNING PROMOTION
OF ALL MANNER OF SERVITUDES, THE
PROMOTION OF THE CONSTELLATION OF
“VALUES” THAT SLAVES ALWAYS PRETEND
TO ESPOUSE.

“Etvl YotiVe gross !"

The Young-Girl already represents the
most effective agent of behavioral con-
trol. Through her, the dominant power
has insinuated itself into the farthest
reaches of everyone’s life.

The violence with which femininitude is adminis-
trated in the world of authoritarian commodities

The Young-Girl as Compact Political Apparatus / 103

recalls the way the dominant power feels free to
manhandle its slaves, when in fact it needs them
to ensure its own reproduction.

The Young-Girl isthe power against which itis barbaric,
indecent, and even downright totalitarian to rebel.

In the world of authoritarian commodities,
the living recognize within themselves,
in their alienated desires,
the enemy’s demonstration of power.

1 04 / Theory of the Young-Girl

7

THE YOUNG-GIRL AS WAR MACHINE

The Young-Girl displays spontaneous assent to
everything that could possibly signify subjugation
to necessity — "life,” “society,” "work,” the education
of a child, another Young-Girl. But this assent is
itself determined in exclusively negative terms:
Assent is given to these things only insofar as they
block all individual expression.

<ijhere is ahmufji cl ftenaL cedent^ hiding.

behind the QJemng-i^ieUiL tdieified untile.

The Young-Girl knows no other legitimacy than
that of the Spectacle. Inasmuch as the Young-Girl
is docile under the arbitrary rule of THEM, she is
tyrannical when it comes to the living. Her sub-
mission to the impersonality of the Spectacle gives
her the right to submit anyone to it.

105

In fucking as in all other sectors of her existence,
the Young-Girl behaves like a formidable
mechanism for quashing negativity.

Because the Young-Girl is the living presence of
everything that, humanely, wants our death. She is not
only the purest product of the Spectacle, she is the
plastic proof of our love for it. It is through her that we
ourselves pursue our own perdition.

Everything she has managed ho neutralize takes its place,
in the world oF the Young-Girl, as an BCCKSSOry.

Seduction as war. THEY speak of “bombshells” using
a metaphor derived less and less from aesthetic
discourse, and more and more from that of ballistics.

Among the troops occupying all visibility, Young-
Girls are the infantry, the rank-and-file of the current
dictatorship of appearances.

The Young-Girl finds herself in a relationship
of immediacy and affinity with everything that
is competing to reformat humanity.

Every Young-Girl constitutes, in her own
way, an advanced position in the imperialism
of the trivial.

In terms of territory, the Young-Girl appears as the
most powerful vector of the tyranny of servitude.
Who can guess the fury enraging her at any sign
of disobedience? In this sense, a certain type of
totalitarian social democracy suits her marvelously.

106 / Theory of the Young -Giri

The violence
of the Young-Girl
is proportional

to her del i cate

empti ness .

It is through the Young-Girl that capitalism has
managed to extend its hegemony to the totality of
social life. She is the most obstinate pawn of market
domination in a war whose objective remains the
total control of daily life and “production” time.

It is precisely because she represents the total
acculturation of the self, because she defines herself
in terms fixed by extraneous judgment, that the
Young-Girl constitutes the most advanced carrier
of the ethos and the abstract behavioral norms of
the Spectacle.

“One would have to create a major educational project
(perhaps on the model of the Chinese or Khmer Koupc) , with
labor camps where hoys would learn, under the direction of
competent women, die responsibilities and secrets of domestic life. "

The insignificance of the Young-Girl certainly
reflects a situation of infantilization and oppres-
sion, yet she also has an imperialist and triumphant
quality. This is because the Young-Girl fights for
Empire, her master.

Unlike the young girls of Babylon, who,
according to Strabo, willingly gave the temple the

I he Young-Girt as War Machine / 107

money they made from prostitution, the Young-Girl
unwittingly turns her profits over to the Spectacle.

"Furthermore, it was here that the school-
girl's real pandemonium began: behind
these letters there was a heap of confiden-
tial letters from judges, attorneys, public
prosecutors, pharmacists, businessmen,
urban and rural citizens, doctors and such,
from those high and mighty who had always
impressed me so! I stood there aston-
ished [...] Did th ese men, pretense
notwithstanding, socialize with the school-
girl! 'Unbelievable/ I went on repeating,
'unbelievable!' Were they so oppressed by
their Maturity that, unbeknownst to their
wives and children, they had to send long
letters to a modern schoolgirl? [...] These
letters made me finally realize the extent of
the schoolgirl's power. Where wasn't it
present?" (Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke )

The Young-Girl is a procedure of metaphysical
sequestering, which is to say that one is never
imprisoned by her, but always in her.

The Young-Girl is a summons to everyone
to ensure they are worthy of the images
of the Spectacle.

1 08 / Theory of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl

is an instrument

in service to a general politics

of the extermination

of beings

capable

of love.

Identical in this
to the alienated social
whole,
the Young-Girl
hates sorrow
because sorrow
condemns her
just as it condemns

this society.

The Young-Girl works to propagate

a Terrorism of entertainment.

— How many cops does it take to make a Young-
Girl crack a childish smile?

— Even more, EVEN MORE,

EVEN MORE...

The Young-Girl's vocabulary is also that of
Total Mobilization.

“Loyalty,

you’d better.”

The Young-Girl is part of the new lifestyle-
police, making sure that each person fulfills his or
her function , and sticks exclusively to it. The Young-
Girl never enters into contact with a singular being,
but rather with a set of qualities objectivized in a

The Young-Girl as War Machine / 109

role, a character, or a social situation to which one
is supposed to conform no matter what the cir-
cumstance. Thus the person with whom she shares
her own little alienated daily life will always remain
“this guy” or “that girl.”

The Young-Girl covets commodities with an
eye filled with envy, because she sees her prototype
in them, that is, she sees herself, only more perfect.
What remains of her humanity is not only what
she lacks in commodity perfection, it is also the
cause of all her suffering. It is this remaining
humanity, therefore, that she must eradicate.

With unfeigned bitterness the Young-Girl reproaches
reality for failing to measure up to the Spectacle.

The ignorance with which the Young-Girl plays
her role as cornerstone of the present system of
domination L) part of the role.

The Young-Girl is a pawn in the all-out war being
waged by the dominant order for the eradication of
all alterity. The Young-Girl declares it explicitly:
She’s “horrified by negativity.” When she says this,
she is, like Spinoza’s stone, persuaded that it is she
herself who is speaking.

The Young-Girl wears a mask, and, when she
confesses to doing so, it is invariably to suggest that
she also has a "true face" that she will not, or

110/ Theory of the Young-Girl

cannot, show. But this "true face" is still a mask,
a terrifying mask: the true face of domination.
Indeed, as soon as the Young-Girl "lets the mask
fall," Empire is speaking to you live.

. . and what/ if u/e/ eliminated guys/ fiam/ the/ planet/? ^Why/
toy/ to/ (jet/ something new/ out/ of the/oldl Sieh/ofquys/7 ^et/
lid of them/! cYho/ point/ yettiny/ annoyed/ — historically/,
genetically/, man/ has/ done/ his/ time/, ^He/s/ Leaving/ the/ staye/
alt/ hy himself

Every Young-Girl is her own modest purification
business.

Taken together, Young-Girls constitute the most
lethal commando THEY have ever maneuvered
against heterogeneity, against every hint of deser-
tion. At the same time, they mark, at every instant,
the most advanced position of Biopower, its poi-
sonous solicitude, and its cybernetic pacification of
everything. In the hungry gaze of the Young-Girl,
each thing and each being, organic and inorganic,
looks as though it could become possessed, or at
least consumed. Everything she sees, she sees as
and thus transforms into a commodity. It is in this
sense that she also represents an advanced position
in the infinite offensive of the Spectacle.

The Young-Girl is the void that they maintain in
order to hide the vividness
of the VOld.

The Young-Girl as War Machine / 111

^toke/ clj aunty- c^i/iA daesn/ 1 li&e/ lucw,

sAe/ maAea it.

THE YOUNG-GIRL IS THE ULTIMATE SLAVERY
THROUGH WHICH EMPIRE HAS OBTAINED
ITS SLAVES’ SILENCE.

It is not enough to know that the Young-Girl speaks
the language of the Spectacle. It must be further
noted that this is the only language she can under-
stand, and that she thus requires all those who do not
loathe it to speak it.

The semiocratic authorities, who demand
ever more insistently an aesthetic assent to
their world, pride themselves in their
ability to pass off whatever they please as
“beautiful.” But this “beauty” is only socially
controlled desire.

“SICK OF GUYS? GET A DOG! You’re what, 18, 20? You’re
heading off to college to study long and hard? You think
this is the time to lose your momentum by desperately
looking for affection from a boy who’s got nothing to give?
Or worse! Get stuck with an undeveloped boyfriend who’s
not very mature, not very nice, and not always clean ...”

The Young-Girl delivers conformity to all of the
fleeting norms of the Spectacle, and also offers the
example of such conformity.

112/ theory of the Ybung-Girl

Like everything that has achieved symbolic hege-
mony, the Young-Girl condemns as barbaric all
physical violence directed against her aspiration of
society’s total pacification. She and the dominant
power are obsessed with security.

The aspect of the war-machine so striking in every
Young-Girl lies in the fact that she leads her life in
a way no different from the way she wages war. But
on the other hand, her pneumatic void already fore-
shadows her future militarization. She no longer
defends only her private monopoly of desire, but in
a general sense, the state of alienated public articu-
lation of all desire.

It is not their “instinctive drives” that imprison
people within the Spectacle, but the laws of what is
desirable which they have inscribed into the flesh.

The Young-Girl has declared war on GERMS.

The Young-Girl has declared war on CHANCE.

The Young-Girl has declared war on PASSION.

The Young-Girl has declared war on TIME.

The Young-Girl has declared war on FAT.

The Young-Girl has declared war on OBSCURITY.
The Young-Girl has declared war on WORRY.

The Young-Girl has declared war on SILENCE.

The Young-Girl has declared war on POLITICS.

And finally,

THE YOUNG-GIRL HAS BECLARED WAR UN WAR.

The Young Gs! as War Machs# / 1 13

8

THE YOUNG-GIRL AGAINST COMMUNISM

The Young-Girl privatizes everything she appre-
hends. Thus, a philosopher is not a philosopher
to her, but an extravagant erotic object, and like-
wise, a revolutionary is not a revolutionary, but
costume jewelry.

The Young-Girl is an article of consump-
tion, a device for maintaining order, a
producer of sophisticated merchandise,
an unprecedented propagator of Spectacular
codes, an avant-garde of alienation,
and also, an entertainment.

The yes that the Young-Girl says to life expresses
only her blind hate when faced with what is superior
to time.

When the Young-Girl speaks of community, it is
always as a last resort the community of the species,
or of all living things, that she’s thinking of it. She

114

never has a particular community in mind: after all,
she would necessarily be excluded from it.

Even when she thinks she is engaging
her whole “self’ in a relationship, the
Young-Girl is mistaken, because she fails
to also engage her Nothingness. Thus,
her dissatisfaction. Thus, her “friends.”

Because she discovers the world through the eyes
of commodities, the Young-Girl sees in beings
only what resembles commodities. Conversely,
she considers the most personal in herself what
is the most generic: coitus.

The Young-Girl wants to be loved for who she is,
that is, for what isolates her. This is why she
always maintains, in the very depths of her ass, an
evaluative distance.

The Young-Girl epitomizes nothingness, the
paradox, and of the tragedy of visibility.

The Young-Girl is the privileged vehicle
of socio-commodity Darwinism.

The continuous pursuit of sex is a manifestation of
false substantiality. Its truth must not be sought in
“pleasure,” “hedonism,” “the sexual instinct,” or any other
of the existential content Bloom has so definitively

The Young-Gi:1 Against Communism / 1 15

emptied of meaning, but rather in the frenzied search
for some connection with a now inaccessible social
whole. It is a matter, here, of giving oneself a feeling of
participation , via the exercise of the most generic activity
there is, the one that is most intimately linked to the
reproduction of the species. This is the reason the
Young-Girl is the most common and most sought-after
object in this pursuit, because she is the incarnation of the
Spectacle , or at least she aspires to be.

To hear the Young-Girl talk, the question of
ultimate ends becomes superfluous.

In a general sense, all false substantialities sponta-
neously earn the Young-Girl’s favor. Some, however,
are preferred by her. This goes for all of the pseudo-
identities that can claim “biological” content (age, sex,
height, race, menstruation, health, etc.).

The Young-Girl postulates an irrevocable intimacy
with everything that shares her physiology. Her
function is thus to maintain the dying flame of
the illusions of immediacy upon which Biopower
comes to depend.

The Young-Girl is the termite of the “material,” the
marathon runner of the “everyday.” Domination has
made her into the privileged carrier of the ideology of
the “concrete.” Not only does she thrive on “easy,”

116/ Theory of the Young-Giri

“simple,” “real life”; but she also considers the
“abstract,” the “hassle,” as evils it would be judicious to
eradicate. Yet what she calls the “concrete” is itself, in
its savage unilateralism, the most abstract. It is the
shield of wilted flowers hiding the progress of that for
which she has been conceived: the violent negation of
metaphysics. Not only does she resent what she
doesn’t understand, it infuriates her. Her hatred for
what is great, for what is beyond the grasp of the
consumer, is immeasurable.

The Young-Girl uses the “concrete" to keep herself from

succumbing to the metaphysical feeling of her nothingness.

"Evil is whatever distracts” (Kafka).

In truth, the “love of life” on which the Young-Girl
prides herself is nothing but her hatred of danger. Her
pride thus only reveals her determination to maintain
immediacy with what she calls “life”; which, more
precisely, means “life in the Spectacle.”

Among all the aporias whose pretentious accumula-
tion constitutes Western metaphysics, the most
durable seems to be the formation, by repudiation, of
a sphere of “bare life.” There is supposed to be,
beyond qualified — political, presentable — human
existence, an abject, indistinct, unqualifiable sphere
of “bare life”: reproduction, domestic economy, the

The Young-Girl Against Communism / 1 1 7

maintenance of vital faculties, heterosexual coupling ,
or food, all things that THEY have associated, as much
as possible, with “feminine identity,” converging in
this primordial swamp. Young-Girls have only redi-
rected the signs of an operation that they have left
otherwise unchanged. It is thus that they have forged
a very curious species of commonality which THEY
would call the being-for-life, if THEY knew that the
common point of Western metaphysics had been
belatedly identified as the being-for-death. So much
so that Young-Girls have become persuaded that they
are united most profoundly by physiology, daily life,
psychology, bedroom gossip, and THEM. The repeated
failure of their love affairs, like their friendships,
seems incapable of opening their eyes, nor can it make
them see that that is precisely what keeps them apart.

Against finitude, the Young-Girl opposes the
groaning of her organs. Against solitude, the con-
tinuity of the living. And against the tragedy of
exposure, the sense that it's good to get noticed.

Like the beings that constitute its terms, the rela-
tionships that develop in the Spectacle are deprived
both of content and meaning. If only the lack of
meaning, so obvious throughout the Young-Girl’s
life drove her insane; but no, it only leaves her in her
state of terminal nonsense. The establishment of
these terms is not dictated by actual usage — strictly

118/ Theory of the Young-Girl

speaking, Young-Girls have nothing to do together —
nor is it dictated by their taste, however unilateral,
for one another — even their tastes do not belong to
them — but by symbolic utility alone, which makes
each partner a sign of the happiness of the other, the
paradisiac completeness that it is the Spectacle’s aim
to continuously redefine.

Naturally, it is by becoming an argu-
ment for Total Mobilization that
seduction has taken the form of the
job interview and "love" a kind of
mutual, private employment— with
job security for the lucky ones.

"Don't worry!"

The Young-Girl punishes no betrayal more

SEVERELY THAN THAT OF THE YOUNG-GlRL WHO
DESERTS THE CORPS OF YOUNG-GIRLS, OR EVEN
ATTEMPTS TO FREE HERSELF FROM IT.

The Young-Girl’s essential activity not only consists
in separating the “professional” from the “personal,”
the “social” from the “private,” the “emotional” from
the “useful,” the “reasonable” from the “crazy,” the
“everyday” from the “exceptional,” etc., but above all of
embodying these distinctions in her “life.”

The Young -Girl Against Communism / 1 19

~thc '/Jonin/Cjiel eon well $ peak o/ death;
she will imuu'iaMij conclude that aftee nil ,

“thall life.”

The Young-Girl “loves life,” which really

means that she hates all fornu-of-Life.

The Mny-tfinl to. Cihe evefufthiny that ofieaho- Cove
in a, oaciety that ctoeo- evenythinq- to- tenden it utterly
imfioooihte: She Cieo in the name, a £ domination.

What the Young-Girl’s “youth” designates is nothing
but a certain obstinacy in negating fmitude.

The Young-Girl’s ass is
a global village.

When she speaks of "peace” and "happiness," the
Young-Girl's face is that of death. Her negativity is not of
the spirit, but of the inert.

The Young-Girl possesses a singular connection
to bare life, in all its forms.

The Young-Girl has entirely rewritten the book
of deadly sins. On the first page, she has written, in
cute calligraphy,

“Solitude.”

The Young-Girl swims holding
her breath through immanence.

1 20 / Theory of the Young-Girl

9

THE YOUNG-GIRL AGAINST HERSELF:
THE YOUNG-GIRL AS IMPOSSIBILITY

That the Spectacle would have finally reached the
absurd metaphysical conception according to which
everything is supposed to issue from its Idea and not
the opposite — this is a superficial view. In the Young-
Girl, we clearly see just how THEY obtain a reality
such that it seems to be nothing but the materializa-
tion of its concept: THEY amputate it from everything
that would make it singular to the point of making it
similar in poverty to an idea.

This human foreignness to the world of commodities
relentlessly pursues the Young-Girl and constitutes,
for her, the supreme menace, “ menace that, factually,
is in no way incompatible with complete security and
the complete absence of need in the order of eveiyday
preoccupation (Martin Heidegger). This anguish,
which is the fundamental mode of being of whosoever
can no longer inhabit his or her world, is the central,

121

universal, and hidden truth of the era of the Young-
Girl, and of the Young-Girl herself: hidden, because
it is when she is shut away at home, far from any
gaze, that she sobs and sobs. For she who is gnawed
by nothingness, this anguish is the other name for the
solitude, the silence, and dissimulation that are her
metaphysical condition, which she has such a hard
time getting used to.

For the Voung-Girl as For all other Blooms, the
craving For entertainment is rooted in anguish.

Sometimes the Young-Girl is bare life, and sometimes
she is death dressed up. In fact, she is that which
constantly holds both together.

The Young-Girl is closed up on herself;
this fascinates at first,

and then it begins to rot.

ANOREXIA IS INTERPRETED AS A
FANATICISM OF DETACHMENT THAT,
GIVEN THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ANY
METAPHYSICAL PARTICIPATION IN
THE WORLD OF COMMODITIES, SEEKS
ACCESS TO A PHYSICAL PARTICIPATION
IN IT, WHICH, OF COURSE, FAILS.

“Spirituality: our new need? Is there a
hidden mystic in all of us?”

1 22 / The ory of the Young-Girl

Self-interest is but the apparent motive of theYoung-
Girl’s behavior. In the act of selling herself, she is
trying to acquit herself of herself, or at least have
them acquit her. But this never happens.

Anorexia expresses in women the same aporia that
is manifest in men in the form of the pursuit of
power: the will to mastery. It is only that, because
of the greater severity of the culture’s patriarchal
codification upon women, the anorexic brings the
will to mastery to bear upon her body, for she cannot
bring it to bear on the rest of the world. A pan-
demic similar to the one we see today among
Young-Girls emerged at the heart of the Middle
Ages among the saints. Against the world that
would reduce her to her body, the Young-Girl
opposes her sovereignty over her body. In the
same way, the saint opposed the patriarchal
mediation of the clergy to her own direct com-
munion with God; she opposed the dependency
through which THEY would have liked to keep her
to her radical independence from the world. In
saintly anorexia, “the suppression of physical urges
and basic feelings — fatigue, sexual drive, hunger,
pain — frees the body to achieve heroic feats and
the soul to commune with God” (Rudolph Bell,
Holy A norexia ) .

Now that the medical profession has replaced
the clergy in the patriarchal order as well as at the

The Young-Gai Against Haself/ 123

bedside of the anorexic Young-Girl, the cure
rates for what THEY have rapidly named “anorexia
nervosa” are still exceptionally low, in spite of
considerable therapeutic perseverance here as
elsewhere; only in a few countries has the mortality
rate fallen below 15%. For the death of the
anorexic, whether she is holy or “mental,” only
sanctions her final victory over her body, over the
world. As in the intoxication of a hunger strike
pushed to the end, the Young-Girl finds in death
the ultimate affirmation of her detachment and
purity. “[...] the anorexics struggle against feeling
enslaved, exploited, and not being permitted to
lead a life of their own. They would rather starve
than continue a life of accommodation. In this
blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood,
they will not accept anything that their parents or
the world around them has to offer. [... In what]
I shall refer to as genuine or primary anorexia
nervosa, the main issue is a struggle for control,
for a sense of identity, competence and effectiveness”
(Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders: Obesity , Anorexia
Nervosa , and the Person Within).

“Indeed,” concludes the postscript to Holy
Anorexia , “ anorexia could be seen as a tragic caricature
of the disconnected, self-sufficient female, unable to
affiliate and driven by an obsessive desire for power
and mastery”

1 24 / Theory oi She Young-Girl

There is indeed an objectivity of
the Young-Girl, but it is an imaginary
objectivity. She is a contradiction
frozen in tomblike immobility.

Whatever she says, it is not the right to
happiness that the Young- Girl is denied,
but the right to unhappiness.

Whatever the happiness of the Young-Girl might be in
each of the separated aspects of her existence (work,
love, sex, leisure, health, etc.), she must remain essentially
unhappy precisely because these aspects are separated.

Unhappiness is the fundamental mood
of the existence of the Young-Girl.

This is good.

Unhappiness makes people consume.

The suffering and unhappiness intrinsic to the
Young-Girl demonstrate the impossibility of any end
of History in which men would content themselves
with being the most intelligent of the animal species,
renouncing all discursive consciousness, all desire for
recognition, any exercise of their negativity, the
impossibility, in a word, of the American way of life.

When she hears talk of negativity, the Young-
Girl calls her therapist. She has all kinds of tuords
to avoid talking about metaphysics tuhen it has
the bad taste to make itself heard too distinctly:
“psychosomatic" is one of them.

The Young-Girl Against Herself / 1 25

Like the model that she has necessarily, at one
moment or another, dreamed of becoming, the
Young- Girl aims at total inexpressivity, at ecstatic
absence, but the image has been sullied by its incar-
nation, and the Young-Girl manages only to express
the void, the living void, seething and oozing, the
humid void — until she vomits.

The cyborg as supreme and immuno-
deficient stage of the Young-Girl.

The Young-Girl gets depressed because she would
like to be a thing like other things, that is, like other
things seen from outside, though she can never quite
manage it; because she would like to be a sign, to
circulate without friction through the gigantic
semiocratic metabolism.

The whole life of the Young-Girl coincides with
what she wants to forget.

The apparent sovereignty of the Young-Girl is also
the absolute vulnerability of the separated individual,
the weakness and isolation that nowhere find either
the shelter, security, or protection they seem to be
seeking everywhere. Indeed, the Young-Girl lives
forever “hot on her own tail,” that is, in fear.

The Young-Girl presents us with the authentic
enigma of happy servitude, in which we are not quite
able to believe. The mystery of the radiant slave.

1 26 / Theory oi the Young-Girl

The pursuit of happiness summarizes, as its effect but
also as its cause, the unhappiness of the Young-Girl.
The Young-Girl’s frenzy over appearances manifests
her craving for substance that can find nothing on
which to slake itself.

All the elegance of the Voung-Girl never manages
to make one forget her invincible vulgarity.

“Everybody beautiful,
everything organic!”

The Young- Girl wants the best of all worlds.
Unfortunately the “best of all worlds” is not possible.
The Young-Girl dreams of a body that would be
purely transparent to the lights of the Spectacle. In all,
she dreams of being nothing more than the idea THEY
have of her.

Frigidity is the truth of nymphomania, impotence is
the truth of Don Juan, anorexia is the truth of bulimia.

Because in the Spectacle, where the
appearance of happiness also functions as
its sine qua non condition, the duty to simu-
late happiness is the way to all suffering.

The translucent nonexistence of the Young-Girl
attests to the false transcendence she personifies.

what the Young-Girl demonstrates is that no
beautiful surface is without its terrible depth.

The Young-Girl Against Herself / 1 27

The Young-Girl is the emblem of an existential
anguish expressed in the unfounded feeling of
permanent insecurity.

The Spectacle consents to speak of sexual mis-
ery, in order to stigmatize people’s incapacity to
exchange one another like perfect commodities.

It is tme that the obstinate imperfection of the
marketplace of seduction is worrying.

The anorexic scorns the things of this world in the only
way that makes her more contemptible than they are.

Like so many other of our unhappy contemporaries, the
Young-Girl has taken the aporias of Western metaphysics
literally. And it is in vain that she seeks to give herself
form as bare life.

The extreme extent
of male
impotence, of
female frigidity
or rather

of vaginal dryness
can be interpreted
immediately as
contradictions
of capitalism.

1 28 / Theory 01 the Young-Gill

Anorexia expresses, at the level of the commodity,
the most incontinent disgust for them, and for
the vulgarity of all wealth. In all of her bodily
manifestations, the Young-Girl signifies an
impatient rage to abolish matter and time. She is
a body without soul dreaming she's a soul
without a body.

“[. . .] the onset of Saint Catherine of Siena’s
anorexia was a consequence [ . .] of psychic factors,
in her case her will to conquer bodily urges that
she considered base obstructions in her path of
holiness” (Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia) .

In anorexia, we must see much more than a
fashionable pathology: the desire to free oneself
from a body entirely colonized by commodity
symbolism, to reduce to nothing a physical objec-
tivity the Young-Girl wholly lacks.

But this leads, finally, only in her making a new body
from the negation of the body.

Sn tne anorexic Young-Girl, as in the ascetic ideal, the

SAME HATRED Of THE FLESH, AND THE FANTASY OF REDUCING
ONESELF TO PHYSICAL PURITY: THE SKELETON.

The Young-Girl suffers from what we could call
the “angel complex”: She aspires to a perfection
that would consist in having no body. She can read

The Young-Giil Against Herself/ 129

the unilateralism of commodity metaphysics
whenever she steps onto a scale.

The anorexic seeks the absolute in her own way, that
is, she seeks the worst of absolutes in the worst way.

Bloom's desire, and consequently the Young-Girls, is not for

bodies, but for essences.

The absolute vulnerability of the Young-Girl
is that of the shopkeeper, whose merchandise
can be stolen by any uncontrollable force.

The Young-Girl is a “metaphysical” creature in
the adulterated, modern sense of the term. She
would not submit her body to such ordeals, to
such cruel penance, if she weren’t fighting
against it as though it were the devil himself, if
she didn’t yearn to submit it entirely to form, to
the ideal, to the dead perfection of abstraction.
This metaphysics is ultimately nothing but the
hatred of the physical, conceived here as simply
the other side of metaphysics.

"HOWTO DRESS
ORGANICALLY."

The Young-Girl is the commodity's
ultimate attempt at transcending
itself. It fails miserably.

130/ Theory of the Young-Girt

10

PUTTING AN END TO THE YOUNG-GIRL

The Young-Girl is a reality as massive and crumbly
as the Spectacle.

Like all transitory forms, the Young-Girl is an
oxymoron. She is thus the first case of asceticism
without ideal, of materialist penance.

Cowardly devoted to the whims of the Young-
Girl, we have learned to disdain her while
obeying her.

The sexual misery of today in no way resembles
that of the past, because it is now bodies without
desires that burn for not being able to satisfy them.

In the course of its metastasized development,
seduction has lost in intensity what it has gained by
extension. Never has amorous discourse been so
poor as when everyone made it their duty to intone
it and comment upon it.

131

The Young-Girl does not have
the face of a dead girt, as one
might think from reading
avant-garde women’s maga-
zines. but of death itself.

Everyone seeks to sell him or herself,
but nobody manages to do so convincingly.

Contrary to what might seem to be happening, at
first glance, the rapist does not struggle with a
particular woman or man, but with sexuality itself,
as an authority of control.

Upon its emergence, the naked body of the
Young-Girl succeeded in producing a sense of
truth. Since then, we have vainly sought such a
power in ever younger bodies.

The charms we no longer find in the Young-Girl are
the exact measure of what we have already managed
to liquidate in her.

The question is not of the emancipation of the
Young-Girl, but of emancipation in relation to
the Young-Girl.

■ n certain extreme cases, one sees the Young-
I Girl turning the void within her against the
world that made her what she is. The pure void
of her form, her profound hostility to everything
that is, will condense into explosive blocs of
negativity. She will have to ravage everything

132 1 Theoiy of the Young-Girt

that surrounds her. The barren expanse that sub-
stitutes for interiority will long to reduce some
stretch of Empire to equivalent desolation. "Give
me a bomb, I have to die," exalted a Russian
nihilist in the last century, begging to be given
the suicide attack on Grand-Duke Sergei.

For the Young- Girl, as for a man in power, who
in every way resemble each other when they
don’t simply coincide, de-subjectivation cannot
avoid a collapse, a collapse in oneself. Differences
in the height of the fall simply measure the gulf
between the fullness of social being and the
extreme anemia of singular being; in other
words, finally, the poverty of the relation to
the self. And yet, there is, in the one’s
destitution, the power that lacks in the
completeness of the other.

“But I had to remove the aura in which man looks to
wreathe this other female figure, the apparently imma-
terial young girl deprived of sensuality, by showing
that she is precisely the same kind of mother, and that
virginity is, by definition, as foreign to her as to a
courtesan. Indeed, the study also shows that maternal
love itself has no moral value attached to it” (Otto
Weininger, Sex and Character) .

Rarely has an epoch been so violently shaken by
desires, and rarely has desire been so empty.

Putting an End to the Young-Girl / 1 33

The Young-Girl makes one think of the monu-
mentally of platonic architecture looming over the
present; it gives only a fleeting idea of eternity, for
it is already cracking. Occasionally the Young-Girl
also makes one think of something else: a hovel,
invariably.

7 COm DESTROY THE SCH001GIRL 'S MODERNITY BY INTRODUCING INTO
IT FOREIGN AND HETEROGENEOUS EIEMENTS, SCR AM BUNG EVERYTHING UP
FOR ALL IT WAS WORTH’ [WlTOLD GOMBROWICZ, FERDYDURKE).

Beneath the apparent disorder of the desires of the
Caserne Babylone the order of self-interest reigns
supreme. But the order of self-interest itself is only
a secondary reality, whose justification does not lie
in itself, but in the desire for desire found at the
foundation of every failed life.

Changes in the Young-Girl symmetrically follow
the evolution of capitalist modes of production.
Thus, over the past thirty years, we have passed, little
by little, from Fordist seduction, with its designated
sites and moments, its static and proto-bourgeois
couple-form, to post-Fordist seduction, diffuse, flexible,
precarious and deritualized, which has extended the
couple factory to the entire body and the whole of
social time-space. At this particularly advanced stage
ofTotal Mobilization, each of us is called on to main-
tain our “seduction power,” the substitute for “labor
power,” such that, on the sexual marketplace, we can
be fired and rehired at any moment.

1 34 / Theory' of the Young-Girl

The Young-Girl mortifies her flesh in order to
take revenge on Biopower and the symbolic violence
to which the Spectacle subjects it.

The distress she exhibits overwhelmingly reveals,
in its former aspect of unshakeable positivity, sexual
pleasure as the most metaphysical of physical pleasures.

"Some make sophisticated, hip, 'trendy'
magazines. We've made a healthy maga-
zine: fresh, airy, filled with blue skies and
organic fields, a magazine more authentic
than nature itself."

THE YOUNG-GIRL IS ENTIRELY CONSTRUCTED.

THIS IS WHY SHE CAN ALSO BE ENTIRELY DESTROYED.

It is only in her suffering that the Young-Girl is
lovable. There is, evidently, a subversive power in
trauma.

The success of the mimetic logic that has carried the
Young-Girl to her present triumph also contains the
necessity of her extinction.

It is finally the inflation of Young-Girls that will have
most surely undermined the efficacy of each of them.

The theory of the Young-Girl partici-
pates in the training of a gaze that knows
how to hate the Spectacle wherever it
hides, that is, wherever it shows itself.

Putting an End to the Young-Girl / 135

Who, aside from a few halfwit stragglers, can still
be seriously moved in the face of “ the ruse, the
device by which he knows how to insinuate him-
self into the heart of the Young-Girl, the influence
he knows how to hold over her, finally, the fasci-
nating, calculated, and methodical character of
seduction” (Soren Kierkegaard)?

/Ae

tmAowed, io- tAv

The spread of the seduction relation into all social
activities signals the death of whatever was still
living within it. The spread of simulation is also
what renders seduction more and more obviously
impossible. Now is the time of the greatest
unhappiness, the streets fdled with heartless sen-
sualists, seducers mourning for seduction, the
corpses of desires nobody knows what to do with.
It would be a physical phenomenon, like a loss of
aura. As though the electrification of bodies, an
intense separation had caused, began to spread to
the point of disappearance. Out of this, a new
proximity would emerge, and new distances.

A total exhaustion of desire
would mean the end of the market society
and, for that matter, of all society.

1 36 / Theory of the Young-Girt

"As a general thesis, social progress and
changes in time periods occur because of the
progress of women toward liberty" (Francois
Marie Charles Fourier).

When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifice, there is
one final artifice left for her: the renunciation of artifice.
But this last one really is the final one.

In making itself the Trojan Horse of worldwide
domination, desire has emptied itself of everything
that smacked of domesticity, cosiness, privacy. The
precondition of totalitarian reconfiguration of what
is desirable has been its autonomy from every real
object and all particular content. In learning to
train itself on essences, desire has become, despite
itself, an absolute desire, a desire for the absolute
that nothing earthly can quench.

This unquenchability is the central lever of con-
sumption, and of its subversion.

A communization of bodies is to be expected.

Does the everyday

occurrence

of the Young-Girl

still go without saying?

Putting an End to the Young-Girl / 137

The Young-Girl is currently the most luxurious of the goods that
circulate on the market of perishable commodities,

the beacon-commodity of the fifth industrial revolution which
enables the sale of all the others, from life insurance to nuclear

power, the monstrous and very real dream of the most intrepid,
the most fantastical of retailers:

autonomous commodities that walk, talk, and silence, the
thing that is finally alive, that no longer seizes life, but digests it.

Three thousand years of
tireless labor by thousands
of plump shopkeepers,

i

generation after generation finding their crowning achievement
in the Young-Girl: for she is the commodity one is forbidden
to bum, the stock that engenders itself, the inalienable and

•espect, death roiling in itself, she is the law and the police at
:he same time... Who has not, in a flash, seen in her decisive
and funereal beauty the sex appeal of the inorganic?

nontransferable property for which one must still pay, the virtue
that relentlessly makes money; she is the slut who demands

Concepts made for war do not call for unanimity.
And it is only natural that they should be con-
demned for the ignominious realities they reveal.
As for those who have shut their eyes to the sheer
and massive fact of the Young-Girl, what difference
could a little more blindness make?

The Young-Girl is herself the product of
misogyny, but the theory of the Young-Girl is not.
Open up any women’s magazine and you’ll see for
yourself.

The Young-Girl is not always young and,
increasingly, not even a girl. She is but the figure of
total integration into a disintegrating social whole.

When morons, against all the evidence to the
contrary, protest that “The world is not a com-
modity!” and, for that matter, neither are they,
they are feigning a virginity that only proves
their impotence.

We want nothing to do with this virginity nor
this impotence.

We propose a different sentimental education.

I

9 781584 351085

Semiotext(e)

distributed by The MIT Press
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-108-5